Lady Glenorchy's Free Church, Greenside Place, Edinburgh

Lady Glenorchy's Free Church on Greenside Place, Edinburgh, survives today as one of the city's most striking architectural ghosts: its façade forms the frontage of the Glasshouse Hotel beside the Playhouse Theatre, all that remains of a congregation whose story begins with one of the most remarkable women of the eighteenth-century Scottish church — Willielma Campbell, Viscountess Glenorchy.

Lady Glenorchy was widowed in 1771, when her husband James Campbell died and left her very wealthy. Under the influence of several evangelical friends — particularly Jane Hill, sister of the famous preacher Rowland Hill — she became a major patron of the Church of Scotland, supporting ministers financially and building several chapels at her own expense. In Edinburgh this produced "Lady Glenorchy's Chapel," built in 1772–74 on low-lying ground between the Old Town and the village of Low Calton beneath Calton Hill, feued from the garden ground of the Edinburgh Orphan Hospital, midway between the hospital and the medieval Trinity College Kirk. It was a vast plain box holding up to two thousand people, first appearing on Andrew Bell's map of 1773, with an entrance porch on the west side in the traditional pattern.

Her purpose was explicitly social. As the building neared completion in April 1774, Lady Glenorchy wrote to the Moderator of the Presbytery of Edinburgh explaining that the church was expressly aimed at the poor of the city and the relief of the overcrowded city churches, and asking approval to appoint ministers of her own choosing until a congregation was formed. The Presbytery unanimously agreed, and in May 1774 the first service was taken by the Revd Robert Walker of St Giles' — the skating minister of Raeburn's famous portrait — and the Revd Dr John Erskine of Greyfriars. But controversy followed: clergy opposed to her chapel appealed to the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, which forbade all ministers within its bounds to serve there, a ruling the Presbytery successfully appealed to the General Assembly. The way cleared, in 1776 Lady Glenorchy invited Dr Thomas Snell Jones — a Wesleyan Methodist, ordained by the Scottish Presbytery of London — to take the charge. He began in 1779 and held the post for fifty-eight years, until three years before his death in 1837. Lady Glenorchy kept full personal control of her chapel until 1786, transferring it to five trustees, all elders, six months before her death; she was buried in the floor of the chapel itself. The constitution was revised by Act of Parliament in 1837, when the church became a quoad sacra parish.

The Disruption of 1843 split the congregation as it split Scotland. The bulk joined the new Free Church, but lost the building: James Bonar unsuccessfully defended the Free Church members in the lawsuit brought by the Established Church's Edinburgh Presbytery, which wrested away the church and its endowments — and with them any claim to compensation when the North British Railway, building what became Waverley Station, bought the chapel in 1845 and demolished it. The only photograph of the old chapel was taken by Hill & Adamson, whose studio stood barely a hundred metres away, sometime between 1843 and 1847 — an image sometimes misidentified as the Orphan Hospital. Lady Glenorchy herself was exhumed and reinterred at Roxburgh Place in 1859, and exhumed again in 1972 when that church was deconsecrated — three burials for the foundress, a fate as restless as her congregation's.

The displaced Free Church members worshipped in the Royal High School's hall from 1843 until their new church — Lady Glenorchy's Free Church at Greenside — was completed in 1846 by the architect John Henderson, with a congregation of 750. Its first minister, George Ramsay Davidson, came across from the old chapel and served until 1890, assisted from 1865 by his son-in-law Alexander Cusin; James Harvey followed. The Established Church side, after protracted litigation, bought the former Relief Church chapel in Roxburgh Place in 1856, created a quoad sacra parish in 1862. When the Church of Scotland and the Free Church partially reunited from 1900, the two buildings became Lady Glenorchy's North Church (Greenside) and South Church (Roxburgh Place) — the latter rebuilt in 1913 by Peter MacGregor Chalmers and now the Assembly Roxy arts venue.

The congregation's rolls carried notable names: James Bonar senior, an elder from 1808; James Bonar WS and Alexander Bonar, elders from 1830, with their brothers Horatius Bonar — the great hymn-writer — and Andrew Bonar; James Donaldson, founder of Donaldson's School for the Deaf; and John Tawse WS. The North Church was renamed Hillside Church in 1956 on merging with the Barony & St James Place Church, then vacated in 1978 on a further merger with Greenside Church in Royal Terrace. The building served as, among other things, a carpet warehouse, until all but the façade was demolished in 1986. That façade now fronts the Glasshouse Hotel, part of the Omni Centre entertainment complex, opened in June 2003 — Henderson's Gothic frontage of 1846 leading not to pews but to a boutique hotel lobby, renovated in 2018, on the edge of Edinburgh's New Town. Lady Glenorchy's name, attached to chapels, lawsuits, railways and hotels across two and a half centuries, remains one of the most curious threads in the religious history of Edinburgh.