4 February 2025

St Ives Wesleyan Chapel, Chapel Street, Lower Stennack, St Ives

Map of St Ives dated 1908

St Ives Wesleyan Chapel is often referred to as ‘The Mother Church of Cornish Methodism’

Compiled by Val Thomas. St Ives Old Cornwall. With the help of many reference books (particularly ‘St Ives Heritage’ Lena and Donald Bray), newspaper reports, St Ives Museum and Brian and Margaret Stevens.

‘St Ives prides itself on being one of the first Cornish towns to embrace the Methodist beliefs of John and Charles Wesley. John and Charles Wesley were originally Church of England clerymen who made a great impact on St Ives. At first they were far from welcome. The first visit to the district was in 1743 by which time Methodism was well established in the Midlands and the North. Charles was the real founder of the movement before brother John became the leader. Charles rode into St Ives in 1743 after preaching at Angarrack. A Methodist Society 120 strong had been formed in the town earlier that year. John Wesley arrived on 30^th August when he was met with the chanting of “Charles Wesley is come to town, To try if he can pull our churches down.” The next month they preached at Zennor and sailed to Scilly, but when they were back in St Ives they were met with violent opposition by the fishermen and miners who broke the windows of the meeting house. Charles, and sometimes John, would stay at John Nance’s house at the upper end of Street an Garrow, (= the rough street in translation). That first meeting house was the Society’s ‘church house’ and eventually the Wesley Methodist Chapel was built right opposite’. (Taken from ‘St Ives Heritage’, Lena and Donald Bray.)

1600 The earliest records show that this site was an orchard.

1723 There are references to Barber’s/Berber’s Dry House and garden on the site. (A dry house was a place where miners could hang their wet clothes to dry before the next shift.) 1723 was the year in which the dry house became a meeting room for the St Ives Wesleyans.

1743 Captain Steven Turner, a Bristol based Methodist sailed into St Ives. He reported back to John Wesley that he had found a religious society who seemed to preach Methodist teachings. Thomas Williams and William Shepherd were sent to St Ives and became the first ‘preachers’. The ‘dry room’ meeting house was ransacked and destroyed by the mob on the arrival of the Wesley brothers in August. A new single-story chapel was built in its place. The society numbered 120.

1744 The naval victory over Spain was celebrated by a mob pulling down this building too! John Wesley fled to Mr Nance’s house for refuge. The riot act was read.

1745 John Wesley returned to St Ives and was heard in silence due to the ‘Riot Act’ having been read.

1753 The meeting room was enlarged towards Chapel Street and handed to the Methodist Trustees on 1^st November.

1756 There were 34 recorded Methodist societies in Cornwall.

1784. It had seats for 1,400. It was traditional for men to sit on one side and women on the other! John Wesley had noticed that most of his congregation bought or sold smuggled goods and was not pleased!

1785 The enlarged chapel was officially opened.

1789 The Wesley’s concluded their journeys to Cornwall. John preached in the market place and just about the whole town came to listen.

1815 Polsue records the building as having been erected. This building was the Day School premises which were built next to the church. It has a granite ashlar front. The chapel was described as ‘commodious’ and seated 750 people.

1825 October 16^th The Wesley chapel was reopened after an extension. The roof was supported by massive pillars erected through the generosity of Mr Roger Wearne who asked all his seiners to come up to place them in position and fix the heavy girder above, free of cost. The main building of the church had two pitched roofs, with pillars through the middle for the centre gully. The entrance was still in Street an Garrow, although Chapel Street and Gabriel Street were now becoming more in use as a main road.

1832 Cholera arrived in St Ives. The remedy in St Ives was to pray in the Methodist Chapel every Monday and Thursday, have a service in the church on the Wednesday and a prayer meeting at the Primitive on a Friday. On 21^st September all the shops were closed so the people could offer prayers to God.

Mr Waterhouse Kernick, in a letter to Rev. H. Curnow says “The old chapel… is the growth of years, and has been enlarged and adapted to the requirements of successive generations…. A portion of the wall of the first chapel… still stands near its junction with the Wesley Hall buildings, (facing Street-an-Garrow) and the doorway between them was the entrance to the chapel from a small curtilage entered from that street. The chapel then ran parallel with Street-an-Garrow towards where the pillars now stand. Then, so I am told, the length of the chapel was made its breadth; the chapel was enlarged towards Chapel Street and subsequently enlarged to its present length in that street. About 1826 a building similar in size and shape to the enlarged chapel was built on its western side, and when this was completed the division wall was taken down and the row of pillars put in to support the double roof.”

Early images showing the changes to the roof structure from 2 roofs to a single pitched roof. (Top image: Malcolm McCarthy)

1837 Marriages could legally be held in Methodist chapels and registry offices. Fore Street chapel was erected in 1837, much of it was built with ‘blue bowlies’ which were brought in by boat and carried to the Fore Street site in the women’s aprons!

1845 The big Sunday school room was built called the ‘Wesley Day School’. Terms were tuppence a week for the under-sixes and three pence for the over-sixes. The National Church of England school was built a couple of years later. The Wesley Hall, behind was used as a general meeting room and Sunday school.

1851 William Burgess completed the return. (He completed the return on many chapels in the area)

1861 William Booth, later Rev William Booth arrived in St Ives and used Wesley chapel as his base. Seventeen years later he formed the Salvation Army which has a large base, known as the ‘Citadel’, right on the harbour front in St Ives. The Salvation Army celebrated its St Ives centenary in July 1979 with a memorial plaque commemorating Rev William Booth’s mission placed in the citadel.

1866 John Squire built the original three manual organ which was insured for £300. The organ cost £900.

1873 A survey reports 1,200 seats.

1881 The Board School in the Stennack was opened.

1882 The Sunday school had no connecting doors to the Church. The Revd Thomas Cook urgently requested the Trustees of Wesley to have a doorway cut at the South-East corner. A doorway was made on a Saturday night. It enabled the Rev Thomas Cook to enter the schoolroom easily.

1893 Richard Kernick Noall was the master of the Wesleyan School and it taught both sexes.

1894 14^th November there was severe flooding in the area. It was called the Great Flood and wrought a great deal of damage in front of the Wesley Chapel and Schoolrooms.

Aftermath of the Great Flood and the damage it wrought in front of the Wesley Chapel and Schoolrooms (Image: Cohort Hostel website)

Two images from Brian and Margaret Stevens from St Ives Museum

These images show how narrow Chapel Street was at this time. Nowadays we would not call this Chapel Street! (Images from St Ives Museum courtesy of Brian and Margaret Stevens.)

1897 The Trustees resolved to have the main building roofs made into a ‘single span’. This was unheard of at the time. The roof was to be supported by steel, there was not to be any wood whatsoever and the critics said “it was alright for railway stations but not for Chapels or Churches. “How wrong were these critics?” The roof was erected and completed.

The supporting pillars. (Image: St Ives Museum)

The old double roof structure

The roll of Honour from St Ives Wesleyan Church. 1914 – 1919 – unveiled May 1920 (Image: Brian and Margaret Stevens from the St Ives Museum collection)

Image above: St Ives Museum taken in the 1890s

Image: mywesleyanmethodists – Steven Wild)

1936 The organ was first built by Sweetland and Co. of Bath and was opened on Feb 20^th1936.

1949 June 9^th Wesley was re-opened following extensive alterations. The pulpit was brought forward and the choir seats rearranged. Then, following this, four or five new stops were put in and so completing the organ. Two stained glass windows were put in, after long delay caused by the war, and were dedicated on the day of the re-opening.

Harold Rogers advertised for decorators to tender for the interior decoration.

1963 The map below shows the extent to which the chapel has been extended in comparison with the 1908 map originally shown. The building is divided into three interlinked buildings. The map also shows the close proximity of three original chapels in the town: Bedford Road, Teetotal Chapel now known as ‘The Drill Hall’ and the Wesleyan Chapel.

1963 map – St Ives Wesleyan Chapel: now Kids Theatre.

1973 The road was widened opposite the chapel which entailed demolishing many of the older buildings.

1989 The extended organ and the pulpit as photographed by Rev Steven Wild.

1990’s The chapel closed for worship.

1994 Phil Barnett formed the Theatre Company Kids R Us.

1998 Kids R Us Theatre Group purchased the building.

2023 The building began another serious renovation with a café extension in the passage way on the side path and a 350 seat theatre’s auditorium being rearranged.

The former Wesleyan school room is a Grade 2 listed building which is run as a hostel, but the chapel itself is not listed. It has been difficult to chart the exact dates for this chapel as it has changed greatly over time and is not, and never was, one big building but three different buildings: the Wesley Chapel/Church, which is now Kids Theatre, Wesley Hall, which is now run as a part of the hostel which is fronted by the old Wesleyan Day School. the Wesleyan School.

2024 The original chapel on the left and the Wesleyan Day School, now Cohort Hostel on the right.

Connauht Villas

“Connauht Villas were built on the adjoining plot to the Chapel, Meeting Room and Day School. These two substantial dwellings were the residences of the two Wesleyan ministers who cared for the St Ives Circuit. Behind these two stately dwellings were stables, for the chapel had a carriage for ministers to have driven to other chapels in the St Ives District. Access to the stables was from Street an Garrow. Half way up Street an Garrow you will see two properties on the right, set back, and opposite you will detect two brick-fronted cottages. These cottages were built in more recent times, late 19^th or early 20^th century; for here was the opening for the rear of Connaught Villas. But driving out demanded a sweep sufficient to turn either up or down Street an Garrow, or later, when returning back in again, and that is why those two villas are set back. One would suspect that these were Wesleyan properties, for there had to be living quarters for 24hour x 7-day stable worker and carriage driver.”

Information supplied by Brian Stevens, past President of St Ives Old Cornwall.

Further information taken from a letter written by Brian Stevens after reading my account of the Wesley Chapel:

“I was interested especially about the piece concerning Barbers Dry House. Of course, like you remarked when a dry house is recalled the mining comes to one’s mind. Stanley Cock mentioned to me that at one of their OC Meetings during the early 1950s it was about the Mines of St. Ives. The speaker remarked that there is a large working beneath the Wesley Chapel and that when the organist was practising the miners beneath could hear it. Apparently, this working was drained by an adit to the coast. As the BM mark graven in the wall of the School Room, fronting the Stennack, records 66.92 feet above mean average low water, then this aperture may have been only forty or fifty feet beneath the building. My question is, was there a mine shaft in the Dry House locality? to afford miners to descend and ascend to be handy to this abode for washing and then changing of clothes. From Umfula Place, all the way up the Stennack, were miners’ cottages, so it would have been handier for those working in that section of the mine to descend by the dry house, than to climb to the top of the Burrows, descend Trenwith Shaft, and by countless fathoms of ladders to reach the location of mining that in this instance was just under their cottage floors.

Just a thought!”

This information requires research in its own right, but on quickly looking into it I found an article written up in ‘The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph’, Wednesday April 7, 1926. It was a lecture entitled ‘The mining History of St Ives’ – Is it ended yet? Given by Mr. A Hamilton Jenkin.

Here are some excerpts:

”…..Persons were still living who could remember the Stennack Valley full of human and mechanical activity – stamps and tin streams – and many inhabitants of St Ives could recall the singing of the ‘bal maidens’ on their way to work at six o’clock on a summer morning. The old race of miners were skilled and hardy. ……. . Not a few of the mines were driven out under the sea, and the oldest workings of providence mine were beneath Carbis bay beach. At Wheal Margery the water came in through the adit to such an extent that, when the seas were rough, the miners, in danger of their lives, sometimes escaped by the shaft with the sea water pouring on them.

Conditions for the miners were, naturally, very rough, and the men used to get on the tops of the boilers to change from their wet clothes……

The earliest records of mining in St Ives occurred in a manuscript at the British Museum, grants being made to tinners working on streams around Trelyon Cliffs and in the inland parts of St Ives between 1503 and 1520.

Mr Jenkin thought it might be a surprise to many to learn the number of lodes which had been worked in the neighbourhood of St Ives. At one time (around 1820) a small mine was being worked near the North Battery Head on the Island; another mine, locally known as Wheal Snuff, was worked below the high-water mark at Porthmeor beach. The most important of St Ives mines was Consols, in which there were excavated caverns of such great size that a team of 16 horses could be turned in them……

Today, with St Ives a holiday resort, it was difficult to believe that, in the neighbourhood sixty years ago, there were at work twenty mines employing 2,500 people, of whom 1,000 were engaged in the small parish of St Ives.

To show the presence of unsuspected lodes in the area, the lecturer said that within the last decade, excavations were being carried out at the back of Draycott terrace, St Ives and the “back” of a lode was struck…… .”

2023/2024/2025

The St Ives Town Deal is renovating the chapel and these photos are from their website. The building has been re-roofed and had a café added to the side return.

The 1948 stained glass in memory of Henry E. Jacobs window being renovated in 2024.