Ivy Pentecostal Church

Ivy Pentecostal Church, on Ashley Hill at the meeting of the Montpelier and St Werburgh's districts of Bristol, is a small church with an outsized story. Originally built in the late eighteenth century as the chapel of the Asylum for Poor Orphan Girls — the "Blue Maids' Orphanage" — it has been a Pentecostal place of worship since the late 1930s, and across two and a half centuries it has served reformed "fallen women", orphaned girls, a freed American slave turned lay preacher, and finally a diverse modern congregation reaching from inner-city Bristol to the Congo and post-communist Russia. A recognised landmark within the Montpelier Conservation Area and on the Bristol Local List, the little chapel has outlived the institutions that built it and the orphanage that once stood beside it.

The site's religious history begins in 1791, when Ashley Manor House, a Tudor property at the foot of Ashley Hill, was leased to the Magdalen Charity, an institution founded for the reformation of "deluded common women", and a chapel was consecrated for the charity in 1792. Within a few years the site had passed to the Asylum for Poor Orphan Girls of Ashley Down, established to rescue girls who had lost both parents. The orphanage's character reflected the harsher charity of its age: it took only girls aged nine to twelve who had lost both parents, training them for domestic service until sixteen, and — unlike George Müller's famous orphanage nearby — it refused to admit illegitimate children, and excluded black children and those with disabilities. Though directories often give 1791 as the chapel's date, the present building is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction: the orphanage complex at Hook's Mills was substantially rebuilt in the late 1820s after the old premises became unsafe, the Lord Mayor of Bristol laying the foundation stone for a new asylum in August 1827, with the attached chapel consecrated shortly after by the Bishop of Bristol. By the early nineteenth century the orphanage housed around fifty girls, supported entirely by voluntary contributions, and the girls themselves kept up the chapel — decorating the interior and pumping the organ by hand during services. In 1849 the chapel was repaired and refitted after dry rot caused the floor to fail, reopening for worship that November.

One of the chapel's worshippers in the mid-nineteenth century gives it a place in the history of the Atlantic world: Henry Parker, a slave who had fled a Florida plantation and settled in Bristol, came to worship here and eventually served as a lay preacher at the church — a former enslaved man preaching in an English orphanage chapel, a striking emblem of the city's complicated relationship with slavery and freedom. By the late nineteenth century the building had acquired its informal name from the ivy growing over its front: "Ivy Church". The name was not universally liked — in 1889 a correspondent to the Evening Post complained that it failed to reflect the chapel's role, and the Reverend Pitt Eykyn confirmed that the chapel was properly dedicated to St Mary Magdalene and agreed that "Ivy Church" was inappropriate — yet the name stuck and survives in the church's title to this day. The St Werburgh's parish men's Bible class met in the chapel for a decade until 1891, and the orphanage continued to hold its annual services and meetings there into the twentieth century, the guardians proposing in 1916 to rename the institution the Orphanage (The Blue Maids) of Hook's Mills.

The orphanage closed in 1927, its main buildings taken over by the Salvation Army and reopened in 1928 by the celebrated contralto Dame Clara Butt as the Mount Hope maternity home, while the surrounding land eventually became the Ashley Hill Trading Estate after the orphanage's demolition. The chapel, however, survived, and the orphanage trustees sold it in 1933. On 5 April 1938 it was registered for the solemnisation of marriages as Ivy Full Gospel Church, serving a congregation of the Assemblies of God — beginning the building's Pentecostal chapter, which continues today. The church is affiliated with the Assemblies of God in Great Britain and maintains an active ministry of worship, prayer and community outreach, and its congregation has long been notably diverse, described in 2003 as black and white members worshipping together; the building has even served as a local polling station.

The twentieth-century life of the church was vigorous and outward-looking. After the Second World War it enjoyed a settled period of more than fifteen years under Pastor E. C. Crew from the mid-1940s, during which it founded a new Sunday school and church plant at Henbury and became a hub for regional Pentecostal events — by the 1960s hosting conventions with visiting speakers and performers, among them Donald Gee, chairman of the World Pentecostal Churches, in 1961. The congregation threw itself into evangelism: healing crusades and baptismal services in the 1950s that reported "miraculous cures", enthusiastic youth support for Billy Graham's Bristol crusades in the 1960s, and a stream of itinerant evangelists including Francis Lamming — "Uncle Francis" — and the faith healer Melvin Banks. Its horizons were global. The church sponsored members travelling to Pentecostal mission schools abroad, sending off a Bristol teacher in 1963 for a three-year post at a mission school in Kivu Province in the Congo; under Reverend Duncan Franklin in the 1990s it carried medical supplies to Russia after the fall of communism and supported new churches there; and it gave a platform to international voices for justice, including the Zimbabwean former gang member turned evangelist Stephen Lungu and the Rwandan minister Stephen Nahimana speaking after the genocide.

Architecturally, the chapel is modest. Built of Pennant rubble with red-brick dressings and plain quoins, and dismissed by Pevsner as "small and crude", its fabric is originally of 1791–92 but its character is dominated by nineteenth-century alterations. The narrow, unbuttressed west tower — once topped by a slender needle spire, now by a shallow pyramidal roof — has a belfry stage pierced by paired Romanesque lights that replaced earlier round windows, giving the tower the profile of an Italian campanile, an Italianate note continued in the whitewashed archway and wrought-iron gate of the curtilage. The three-bay nave has plain round-headed lancets of an early nineteenth-century type. Small details survive from its orphanage days: in 1865 a new altar cloth was made and embroidered by two sisters who ran a Berlin-wool and silk shop in Stokes Croft, and in 1917 the Blue Maids' Chapel reopened after a £150 restoration. The Pentecostal congregation made its own mark in the mid-1980s, when a major remodelling and extension — approved by Bristol planners in 1984 — added new halls, kitchen and facilities to the rear, replaced a prefabricated centre, and buried a time capsule in the foundations containing the names of 150 congregants, a short history and a statement of beliefs, sealed during a dedication service led from the foundation trench; the enlarged sanctuary opened in August 1985 at a cost of £60,000, with the Lord Mayor attending. In 2007–08 the church's prominence in the conservation area became a community cause when residents campaigned against three large billboards at the junction of Ashley Hill and Sevier Street that obscured the view of the building; after a petition of a thousand signatures and a twenty-four-hour vigil, the hoardings were removed in late 2008.

From a Georgian chapel for reformed women and orphaned girls, by way of a fugitive slave's pulpit and an ivy-covered Victorian rebuilding, to a vibrant modern Pentecostal congregation with missions on three continents, Ivy Pentecostal Church compresses a remarkable span of Bristol's social and religious history into one small building on Ashley Hill — a member of Ashley Churches Together, still serving the diverse neighbourhood that grew up around the orphanage long after the orphanage itself was gone.