Newington Green Unitarian Church is one of England's oldest Unitarian churches, located on Newington Green, north London. The site has maintained strong ties to progressive political and religious causes for over 300 years, and is London's oldest Nonconformist place of worship still in use. The church was founded in 1708 by English Dissenters, a community of which had been gathering around Newington Green for at least half a century before that date. The church is operated by New Unity and is part of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.
Its most famous minister was Dr Richard Price, a political radical who is remembered for his role in the Revolution Controversy, a British debate about the French Revolution, but who also did pioneering work in finance and statistics. The most famous member of its congregation was Mary Wollstonecraft, who drew inspiration from Price's sermons in her work, both in arguing for the new French republic and in raising the issue of the rights of women. Wollstonecraft is commemorated by a mural in the church which has been described as "the birthplace of feminism".
The building, which faces the north side of the green, was extended in 1860, and was listed in 1953. It lies within the London Borough of Hackney, although the rest of the green is part of the London Borough of Islington.
Background to its creation After the end of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth and the Restoration of Charles II, those in England and Wales who were not members of the Church of England found themselves in an uncomfortable position. Several pieces of legislation, known collectively as the Clarendon Code, made their lives difficult. The first restricted public office to Anglicans. The Act of Uniformity the following year was a step too far for many clergymen, and about 2,000 of them left the established church in the Great Ejection of 1662. The third act forbad unauthorised religious meetings of more than five people. The final one prohibited Nonconformist clergymen from living within five miles of a parish from which they had been banned. Where the ministers went, their flocks tended to follow.page 4. Some of these restrictions were ameliorated a generation later, with the passing of the Act of Toleration 1689, which guaranteed freedom of worship for certain groups. It allowed Nonconformists (or Dissenters) their own places of worship and their own teachers and preachers, subject to certain oaths of allegiance and to the registering of these locations and leaders, but it perpetuated their existing social and political disabilities, including their exclusion from political office and also from universities (Oxford and Cambridge were the only universities in England and Wales at that time).
Roman Catholics were specifically targeted by these acts, and many of them went underground. Some Christians who had hoped for a more Protestant Reformation within the Established Church chose to emigrate, especially to the American colonies, as the Pilgrim Fathers had done in 1620. Others maintained their faith openly, and lived with the restrictions the state placed upon them, moving to areas where they were tolerated. Often they set up educational establishments, known in general as dissenting academies, which were intellectually and morally more rigorous than the universities.Thorncroft p5 One such was at Newington Green, then an agricultural village a few miles from London, but now within Inner London. Unitarianism or Rational Dissent—"that intellectual aristocracy in the ranks of Dissent, as historians often characterise it"—had an obvious affinity with education, critical enquiry, and challenges to the status quo, and is "one of the roots of modern English Culture"."Spirit of the Age" by Tom Paulin. 5 April 2003 The Guardian A critical mass of such people, including "dissident intellectuals, pedagogues with reforming ideas and Dissenters" and "the well-to-do edge of radical Protestantism" clustered around Newington Green. Not all of these free-thinkers were Unitarians, such as Quaker John Coakley Lettsome (physician, philanthropist, and abolitionist) or the Anglicans Vicesimus Knox (pacifist and writer) and George Gaskin (minister and long-time secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), but most had some connections to the chapel on the green.
The building and its religious neighbours
The original building of 1708 was financed with £300, , from Edward Harrison, a goldsmith. He leased it to the trustees of the congregation, who furnished it with pulpit, pews, and so on, raising the necessary £96 from about 20 subscribers, primarily by hiring or selling pews.Thorncroft, p8 It was a "substantial brick building, of nearly square form, with the high, tiled, projecting roof, common at its era",History and Topoography of the Parish of St Mary, Islington by Samuel Lewis, 1842, cited in Allardyce, p9. "Historic views show that the original façade had a small pediment against a large hipped roof, with a central oval window below." It was too plain for Wollstonecraft's Anglican tastes,Gordon, p42. and one of her biographers thought it defiantly stark.Jacobs, p38-39. This building was substantially extended and improved in the mid-19th century. An internal gallery was built to increase the seating available, and a few years later the roof and apse were renewed, and a "stuccoed frontage" was built, "mirroring the original façade with a three-bay front with two round-headed windows, but with added Tuscan pilasters and a large pediment".Allardyce, p35.
Other religious institutions existed nearby. St Matthias, one of London's foremost high churches, was built a couple of hundred yards away between 1849 and 1853, partly with money from a rich doctor named Robert Brett,Allardyce, p33. who thought that the Dissenting chapels were attracting so many worshippers in part because the Anglican pews were full.'Stoke Newington: Churches', A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8: Islington and Stoke Newington parishes (1985), pp. 204–211. Accessed 29 May 2009. Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire established a congregation in the area by 1876, and built the Dalston Synagogue in adjoining Poets Road in 1885. This Victorian Gothic building became one of the leading synagogues of London, with Jacob Koussevitzsky as its cantor from 1936.Allardyce, p39. Fronting onto the green itself was the China Inland Mission headquarters (circa 1895), an organisation responsible for 18,000 converts to Christianity that had been founded by James Hudson Taylor at the height of the Victorian era.Allardyce, p36. St Matthias still operates as a church; the synagogue was demolished in the 1970s; the missionary building is now international student housing.
Newington Green fell within the old parish boundaries of Stoke Newington. Although the latter village, centred on Church Street, was a mile away from the hamlet of the Green, across farmland or along the ancient drovers' road of Green Lanes, the two places had and still have a close connection. From the mid-1640s to the mid-1650s, Stoke Newington's parish church was led by Thomas Manton, "a principal person among the non-conformist ministers",;Robinson, p141. a staunch and popular defender of Reformed principles, he participated in the Westminster Assembly, acted as chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and preached before Parliament on several occasions. Another Dissenting meeting house was built in Stoke Newington about 1700, near the house of Mary Abney, who had inherited the manor. Later that century the village became known for its Quaker inhabitants; their meeting house was designed by the architect William Alderson. In 1858 the medieval parish church of St Mary was supplemented by an impressive Victorian Gothic building opposite, by Sir George Gilbert Scott. In addition to the buildings, Stoke Newington was remarkable for its range of social reforms, from its connections to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade to the foundation of the innovative Newington Academy for Girls.
As the NGUC lacks its own cemetery, some of its congregants, such as the poet and banker Samuel Rogers, are buried in St Mary's churchyard. However, as the Church of England normally limits its cemeteries to its members, most of the Newington Green Unitarians opted for Bunhill Fields until the middle of the 19th century, and then Abney Park Cemetery thereafter. (Robert Southey called the former the Campo Santo of the Dissenters, but the phrase was used for both.) Wollstonecraft was married and later buried at St Pancras Old Church a few miles away.
Earliest years: to the mid-eighteenth century Newington Green Unitarian Church has been associated with many historically significant people on both sides of the pulpit, especially but not exclusively in the eighteenth century. Charles Morton (1626–1698), the great educator who ended his career as vice-president of Harvard University, ran an influential Dissenting Academy, "probably on the site of the current Unitarian church".Allardyce, p7. One of his friends, James Ashurst, founded a group that worshipped in private houses licensed for the purpose, and, in time, this small congregation decided to build a proper meeting house. (It is worth mentioning here the early religious evolution of this church. It started as Presbyterian, with views on the Trinity as orthodox as those held by the Church of England. In fact, several of its first ministers chose to conform, i.e. rejoin, the established church:Thorncroft, ch.3 "The Early Years: 1714–1758" one of these was Richard Biscoe, who gave the Boyle Lectures in the late 1730s. However, NGUC soon acquired ministers who were Arian, that is, who denied the Trinity, although they retained their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.Thorncroft, p11 Thus was the Unitarian nature of the church created. In the mid-nineteenth century it was described by a local historian as a Socinian Independent meeting house.Robinson, p210.) The author Daniel Defoe, who attended school at Newington Green, is believed to have attended the church."Defoe in Stoke Newington". Arthur Secord, P.M.L.A. Vol. 66, p. 211, 1951. Cited in Thorncroft, p9, who identifies him as "an American scholar". Isaac Watts, the "Father of English Hymnody", theologian, logician, and educator, was brought up as a non-Conformist, lived from 1736 to 1748 at Abney Park nearby, and during that period "was known to have adopted decidedly Unitarian opinions", so he too may have attended NGUC.Thorncroft, p10. Samuel Wright, son of a nonconformist minister in Nottinghamshire, writer on theological issues and "a very eminent divine among the Presbyterians" lived at Newington Green until his death in 1746.'Stoke Newington', The Environs of London: volume 3: County of Middlesex (1795), pp. 280–305. Accessed 31 May 2009. Several of the church's ministers were at the same time, or had been, the librarians at the theological collection known as Dr Williams's Library, an establishment still very much alive.
Later eighteenth century: the voices heard round the world
Richard Price