Church History

In 1662, Puritan and other dissenting Christians, including Congregationalists who didn’t agree with all the Church of England stood for, were ejected from All Saints Church, High Street, Southampton (inside the town walls, south of the Bargate) – an action repeated around the country as part of the Great Ejection.  Local dissenters first met in homes.  But soon they constituted themselves as an independent congregation in 1668, with Isaac Watts senior as an Elder (his son Isaac, born in 1674, would one day become a celebrated writer of hymn texts).  Twenty years later, after the Glorious Revolution put a protestant monarch on the throne, all nonconformists could worship more freely.

In Southampton this dissenting group continued their meetings just north of the town walls in Above Bar street, from 1688 calling themselves Above Bar Chapel, later Above Bar Congregational Church. The first nonconformist church in Southampton, it was one of the oldest in the country.  In 1690, its members built their own church in Above Bar (Primark now stands on the site), enlarging it in 1727 and 1802.  By 1820 they’d built another church further back from the road, enlarging it in 1841.  Then in 1889 they rebuilt its frontage and increased seating capacity yet again, reflecting the growth of nonconformism nationally.

In 1940 Above Bar Congregational Church was destroyed by enemy bombing, never to be rebuilt.  Its members, however, continued to meet in other spaces, broadening their cooperation with further nonconformist churches in the Southampton area, notably St Andrew’s Presbyterian.  Together with our additional ‘parent’ churches mentioned below, these early influences would do much to shape Avenue St Andrew’s URC.

In 1844, for example, some Above Bar worshippers had broken away because they felt the minister was too moderate and apolitical.  This group worshipped in temporary accommodation until they bought the old infirmary buildings in St Mary’s Street, calling themselves Albion Chapel.  In 1848 the infirmary buildings were replaced by a larger building designed for worship.  Albion Chapel finally closed in 1935, as fewer of its members lived in the area.  Many would join other churches in the town, including Avenue Congregational Church on the Avenue, founded in the 1890s.

Presbyterians in Southampton first met for worship in the Baptist chapel in Portland Street.  From 1849 to 1853 they met in the Royal Victoria Assembly Rooms, but then in 1853 moved into their own purpose-built church in Brunswick Place, becoming St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of England.  When Above Bar Church was destroyed in 1940, most of its congregation moved to St Andrew’s.

Meanwhile Northam Chapel, or Northam Congregational Church, was built in 1863 in Belvidere Terrace near the River Itchen, originally as a missionary outreach of Above Bar Church.  It too was destroyed by enemy action in 1940.  After meeting in a school for a while, its worshippers later joined with the Above Bar congregation at the Friends Meeting House.  In 1942 St Andrew’s Presbyterian invited the congregations of both Northam and Above Bar to join with them at St Andrew’s, at first as separate congregations.  All three groups became St Andrew’s United Presbyterian Congregational Church in 1948.

Avenue Congregational Church had been founded in 1892 by the wealthier members of Albion Church who’d moved to the town’s growing northern suburbs and found the walk back to Albion Church on Sundays too long.  They met first in a temporary corrugated iron church on the site of the present church hall while their new building was being erected.  This attractive Southampton landmark, designed by James Cubitt and now known as Avenue St Andrew’s URC, dates from 1898.

Both St Andrew’s United Church and Avenue Congregational Church, separately, became United Reformed churches in 1972, when that fresh denomination was created in a spirit of hopeful ecumenism.  The two congregations joined forces some fourteen years later in the Avenue building, becoming Avenue St Andrew’s URC in 1986.

In 2006, after a major renovation added a glass-fronted Concourse to connect our halls to our sanctuary, this church, the present one, became part of the four-church South West Hants Group within the URC Wessex Synod, sharing ministers.  That group was succeeded in 2024 by the six-church Southern Fellowship as a further cluster of the remaining URC churches in the wider Southampton-Romsey area of Hampshire.

This long-range pattern in Southampton church history, covering more than 350 years of theological shift, urban expansion, wartime disruption and changes in social practice, is a microcosm of national trends over the same period.  To be sure, growth and retraction are part of a dynamic process.  Providentially, ‘under God’s good hand’ (Rev. Dr David Cornick, 1998), our several traditions came together successfully in the 1970s, and were even enlarged in 1981 by the joining of the United Churches of Christ, and in 2000, the Congregational Union of Scotland.  We are still here as one blended denomination now, the United Reformed Church, putting faith into practice, cooperating with each other and continuing to serve our local communities.