The Architecture of Dissent

Dismissed as irredeemably ugly, the Bethels and Zions of the side-lanes and back-streets stand unnoticed, while their nineteenth-century successors, though they may have crept into the High Street with a Gothic or a Grecian façade, have attracted scant attention. Yet they are the products of a long tradition of vernacular architecture, the work of local craftsmen and builders, who followed an accepted form and style, itself dictated by the immediate needs of the local worshippers.

One of the assumptions most frequently made about Nonconformist building is that there was remarkably little of it before the Toleration Act of 1689, and that, both for reasons of economy and because of fear that toleration might be revoked, it was then mainly domestic in character and retiring in situation.