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Old
Meeting Unitarian Church, Great Yarmouth Unitarianism was a
popular enthusiasm in urban East Anglia, and particularly
so in Norfolk. There was a dissenters chapel on this site
from as early as 1644, decades before such things were
allowed by the Act of Religious Toleration, but this was
in the years that the World Turned Upside Down, and the
Puritans were a strong force in Yarmouth. In 1845, a
Unitarian chapel was built on the site, taking its name
of the Old Meeting Unitarian Church from the previous
chapel. However, on the night of 8th July 1941 the chapel
was completely destroyed by German bombing, along with
much of the Middlegate area.Hauntingly, a building behind
the chapel has been preserved as it was left by the bombs
that night.
The
chapel was rebuilt, and reopened in 1954. It is
fully of the previous decade, before the 1951
Festival of Britain had jollied up English
architecture with its infectious frivolity. The
result is a rather austere, even municipal
exterior, but the chapel inside is full of light,
and its clean lines are rather more uplifting. Gathered
together in one corner are the late 18th and
early 19th Century memorial plaques rescued from
the bombed building, which in turn had taken them
from the earlier chapel on the site. One of them
is to JM Benyon, this exemplary man, who
officiated as minister in this place fifty nine
years, inculcating by precept and example the
principles of piety and virtue. There are
later plaques to ministers on the flanking walls,
and a very good stained glass window above the
entrance by the King workshop of Norwich. It
depicts Christ summoning St Peter and St Andrew
to make them fishers of men, a story which must
have resonated with generations of Yarmouth men
and women. The signatures on the glass can also
be found in the windows of St Julian's church in
Norwich, similarly rebuilt after German bombing.
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