Goodshaw Chapel
Goodshaw Chapel is a former Baptist chapel on Goodshaw Avenue in Crawshawbooth, near Rawtenstall, in Lancashire, built in the eighteenth century.
The chapel is in the care of English Heritage; the only non-conformist chapel amongst their many sites.
The chapel is built of local stone and externally at least it may resemble a sizable private house, though built as a chapel and used as such until it closed in the 1960s. Within, Goodshaw Chapel displays a complete set of box-pews, galleries and pulpit, which was crafted at some time between 1742 and 1809. The plain design typifies the style of non-conformist places of worship of the time: unadorned, functional and built from the limited funds available to the congregation.
History
The first known Baptists meeting hereabout was established at Lumb in 1742, and this was joined in 1760 by a Wesleyan congregation, requiring the building of a new chapel, on what was then the main Burnley road, though now a minor lane. The Lumb chapel was demolished and material salvanged to build the new chapel at Goodshaw: whether the pulpit came from Lumb or was a new work at Goodshaw is not known. The pews were reputedly brought across the moor from Lumb on the shoulders of the men.
The building of new textile mills brought population growth and a greater congregation so that the cpel had to be expanded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, absorbing into the body of the church the old Sunday school room, to the form in which it is now seen. In 1864 a complete new chapel was built on the main road and the original Goodshaw Chapel was largely disused.
By the late 1960s the chapel was derelict. In 1975 it was acquired by the Department of the Environment in recognition of it as a unique survival of an early nonconformist chapel with its original internal feature, and later passed to English Heritage. A full restoration scheme was completed in 1984.
Internal fittings
Within the chapel, the interior fittings give an excellent impression of a small, rural, non-conformist chapel of the Georgian Age. The close-packed box pews are early nineteenth century carpentry. There are wooden galleries above reached by stone-slabbed staircases. The side galleries are largely original, dating from 1760.
On the south side is a larger pew that accommodated the chapel singers, and the communion table; above it is the fine early nineteenth-century pulpit with its staircase and the canopy that functioned as a sounding-board.
The graveyard too has a particularly interesting collection of early nineteenth-century gravestones, with moving epitaphs and inscriptions.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Goodshaw Chapel) |
References
Books
Brandon, V and Johnson, S: ‘The Old Baptist Chapel, Goodshaw Chapel, Rawtenstall, Lancs’, Antiquaries Journal, 66/2 (1986), 330–57