I thought I would start a thread on this important building. The mural tablets from the Meeting House were taken to Key Hill Chapel but I suppose they were lost after it was demolished.
This is a drawing of the first meeting house before it was destroyed in the riots.
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I posted lots on the Meeting Houses in various places Wendy...but Cannon Street was never mentioned much..? The one you picture was in Colmore Street...as explained below...I am confused as to the link betwixt Unitarian and Baprist...but then I'm a Heathen...can you enlighten this miserable sinner?
In that late 18th century, while Revolution raged in France, many in Birmingham feared that religious dissent might lead to revolution against the Church of England and the British monarchy. Dissenters are those that refuse to accept the doctrines of an established church, in this case Protestants who dissented from the Church of England.
Joseph Priestley, a dissenter, was minister of the
Old Meeting House (which Hutton describes in detail). Priestley had written an inflammatory pamphlet that described 'laying gunpowder' under the 'old building of error'. This had caused alarm among supporters of the established church, who believed they were under threat. Priestley had already gained notoriety for his criticism of an attack on the French Revolution by Edmund Burke (a conservative statesman and political thinker).
On 14 July 1791 Priestley and his followers met at a dinner in the Dadleys Hotel, Temple Street, to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming the Bastille. Their opponents took this as an opportunity for full-scale riot. They attacked and burned the Meeting Houses and the homes of a large number of Priestley's friends and supporters, many of them respected Birmingham citizens.
In her tome, Kate mentions that the Unitarian Old Meeting House built in 1689 was so popular that they had to build an overflow one in DERITEND, of all places. This they called the
LOWER MEETING HOUSE, because of it’s geography. Anyway, to cut a long story short, this was also burned to a crisp by the rioters, and the ruins became a workshop. From the enclosed piece from her book you can see that this area was entered via
MEETING HOUSE YARD. Now this is red meat and drink to an Alleyway freak, so I thought where was this please Miss? Why haven’t I heard of it before? So I looked it up.
Blimey Matron, some clever clogs University types had only gone and done an architectural dig in my old rellies stamping grounds of Moores Row and Milk Street in Deritend, AND mentioned Lower Meeting House Yard by name, hadn’t they? And look what they discovered?