The Congregational Chapel once
sat on a triangular site at the junction of Great Ancoats Street and
Palmerston Street. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the
architect of Manchester Town Hall, Owens College
and the Natural History Museum in London.
The site chosen for the church
was once part of the grounds of Ancoats Hall. I have indicated it
with a red dot on the segment of the 1845 map below.
The image below shows Ancoats Hall in 1880
When the railway line was built
into the Ancoats "Midland" Goods Station, it cut off a small triangle
of
land on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Palmerston Street.
I don't know the date of the railway construction but Waterhouse's
design for the chapel shows that he was fitting it into a triangular
site suggesting that the railway came first.
The chapel was completed in
1864 at a cost of £4,655 and it accommodated 1020 worshippers. It
also featured a school under the chapel.
If you click on the link below
you can see the chapel after it closed as a church and during a period
when it was home to Tideswell's, the tool makers. As you can see
the top of the tower has been removed. The railway bridges over Great
Ancoats Street and Palmerston Street can be seen carrying the railway
line behind the chapel and defining the triangular site.
Congregational Chapel
The link below shows the building during demolition. The date on the image is 1959.
Congregational Chapel 1959
The images below were taken in
2010 and they show the point where the railway line coming out of
Ancoats Goods Station crossed Great Ancoats Street. You can see
that the bridge is gone but the concrete slab on which it stood is
still there.
Here is the same site again this time looking down Pin Mill Brow.
Here is the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Palmerston Street in 2010.
