West Sleekburn Primitive Methodist chapel

Further to the preaching places in Sleekburn recorded in the 1851 Census, in time chapels were built in West Sleekburn.

Whilst exploring his family history, Mark Walley unearthed two Methodist chapels at the former West Sleekburn Colliery, west of Blyth. Sleekburn Colliery opened in 1859 and closed in 1962. In the first half of the Twentieth Century it employed up to 960 people.

At the colliery, the 1896 Ordnance Survey map shows three  housing terraces running east west, one north of the colliery and two south of it.  South of the colliery there were two parallel terraces. The longer, northern one of the southern two, called confusingly Single Row, has a Wesleyan Methodist chapel at its western end and a Primitive Methodist chapel at its eastern end – as far apart from each other as they could be!  Access to the chapel was from Brock Lane.

Both chapels are still there on the 1921 Ordnance Survey map and in the 1940 inventory of Methodist buildings when they are recorded as West Sleekburn  (West End) and West Sleekburn (East End).  Both were in the Blyth and Seaton Delaval circuit. The inventory records the chapels as around the same size, seating 200 in the Prim chapel and 208 in the Wesleyan chapel both on pews, each with a Sunday school room and the Wesleyan chapel having 5 extra rooms compared to 3 at the Prim chapel.

Google Street View in 2020 shows the line of Institute Row, the more southerly of the two southern terraces,  still exists as a track at the southern boundary of the woodland area which has replaced the colliery.

West Sleekburn was one of the twelve chapels in the Blyth circuit.  It  is on the 1891 Blyth Circuit plan when the Steward was Robert Grieves. Services were held at 2:00 and 5:30 with a morning Sunday school.

The chapel played a part in the lives of both Mark Ferguson and James Absalom