Wokingham Primitive Methodist chapel
Denmark St, Wokingham RG40 2AY
The Primitive Methodist magazine for September 1857 contains an account by J Thomason of the opening of Wokingham Primitive Methodist chapel. At the time Wokingham was a town of about 3,500 people and was first missioned in the late 1830s. Meetings were held in the open air, then in a cottage and then in a leased upstairs room fitted out as a place of worship.
When the lease ran out a piece of land was given by J Walters MP and a new chapel built. Opening services were held on June 21st 1857 with sermons from CH Harcourt (Baptist) and Rev E Bishop (London). 220 people came to the following day’s tea meeting.
The chapel was 30′ x 21′ and 13′ high, and boasted air bricks in the walls and ceiling, and gas lighting. It cost £200 of which they had raised £90.
On the 1872 1:2,500 Ordnance Survey map the Primitive Methodist chapel is marked at the junction of Denmark Street and Langborough Road, where the British Red Cross building is in 2016. It was still there on the 1912 map, but by 1933 it has become the Memorial Clinic.
On Google Street view in September 2016, the building fronting the street is a modern one, but to the rear is a building which could well be part of an earlier chapel.
Reference
Primitive Methodist magazine September 1857 pp.555-556
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The building beside and slightly behind the Red Cross building does look for all the world like an old chapel, but according to a Facebook post in 2020 by the local Town Council it’s actually the Sunday school. The chapel itself disappeared under the footprint of the clinic. The Town Council said:
“In 1902, a small annexe was built to house a Sunday school which is now the only part of the original [chapel] building left. However, eight years after the Sunday school had been built, the chapel was closed.
In 1920, an orthopaedic clinic was opened firstly in two rooms inside Wokingham Town Hall but the rooms soon proved too small with little privacy for patients and no waiting area so in 1922 the Denmark Street chapel was bought by the town to be its memorial to all who had served in the war, starting a new life as a Health and Red Cross Centre. Orthopaedic work continued there until 1981 when it transferred to better equipped facilities at Wokingham Hospital.
Today the Red Cross centre on Denmark Street is still used by volunteers to provide short-term loans of medical equipment, such as wheelchairs.”
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