Newington Green Unitarian Church

Newington Green Unitarian Church, on the north side of Newington Green in north London, is one of England's oldest Unitarian churches and London's oldest Nonconformist place of worship still in use. Founded in 1708 by English Dissenters whose community had gathered around the green for at least half a century before, it has kept faith with progressive political and religious causes for more than three hundred years, earning the description, for the years when Mary Wollstonecraft sat in its pews absorbing the sermons of Dr Richard Price, of the birthplace of feminism. Today the church is operated by New Unity within the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, and its building, listed in 1953, stands in the London Borough of Hackney facing a green that belongs to Islington.

The church was born of persecution. After the Restoration of Charles II, the laws known as the Clarendon Code drove some two thousand clergymen out of the established church in the Great Ejection of 1662, banned unauthorised religious meetings of more than five people, and exiled Nonconformist ministers from their old parishes. The Act of Toleration of 1689 at last allowed Dissenters their own registered meeting houses, though it left them barred from public office and from the universities. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, they founded dissenting academies, often more rigorous than the universities themselves, and at Newington Green, then an agricultural village outside London, the great educator Charles Morton, who ended his career as vice-president of Harvard, ran an influential academy, probably on the very site of the present church; Daniel Defoe was among his pupils and is believed to have attended the congregation. Morton's friend James Ashurst founded the group that worshipped in licensed private houses until, in 1708, a goldsmith named Edward Harrison financed a proper meeting house with £300, the congregation furnishing it with pulpit and pews paid for by some twenty subscribers. The original building was a substantial, almost square brick box with a high tiled roof, so plain that Wollstonecraft's biographer thought it defiantly stark; an extension of 1860 added the gallery, a renewed roof and apse, and the stuccoed three-bay frontage with Tuscan pilasters and pediment that faces the green today. The congregation began as orthodox Presbyterian, but soon acquired ministers of Arian views, denying the Trinity, and so grew into its Unitarian identity.

The church's golden age arrived in 1758 with Dr Richard Price, the Welsh philosopher-minister who made the village famous as a centre of radical thinkers and social reformers. From his house at No. 54 the Green, part of London's oldest surviving brick terrace of 1658, and from the chapel pulpit, Price received an astonishing procession of visitors: the American Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; John and Abigail Adams; British statesmen including the Earl of Shelburne and even Prime Minister William Pitt; the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith; the prison reformer John Howard; and the clergyman-mathematician Thomas Bayes, of Bayes' theorem. Price rejected original sin, preached the perfectibility of human nature, and wrote so brilliantly on finance, probability and life insurance that the Royal Society elected him a fellow. His defence of the American Revolution made him famous; his sermon of 1789 on the 101st anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, welcoming the French Revolution, ignited the pamphlet war known as the Revolution Controversy, drawing Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in furious rebuttal, and in Price's defence the replies of his friends Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. When the Birmingham mob burned the home of Joseph Priestley, the Dissenting discoverer of oxygen, he fled to the sanctuary of Newington Green.

Wollstonecraft had come to the Green in 1784, a young unmarried schoolmistress moving her fledgling girls' school there with the help of Mrs Burgh, widow of the educationalist James Burgh, who treated her almost as a daughter. A lifelong Anglican, she was welcomed at the chapel without any expectation of conversion, and found among the Rational Dissenters a community hard-working, humane and respectful towards women, kinder to her in need than her own family. Price became her mentor, and through him she met the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, who launched her career with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. The ideas she absorbed in the chapel germinated into A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her answer to Burke, and then in 1792 into A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, extending Price's arguments about equality to her own sex; her biographer Claire Tomalin observed that women, like Dissenters, were excluded as a class from education and civil rights, and bore the marks of that exclusion. A commemorative mural inside the church honours her, and a banner on its railings has proclaimed the building the birthplace of feminism.

The succession of remarkable figures continued. Joseph Towers, minister from 1778 to 1799, a bookseller's son who educated himself into a doctorate of law, helped compile the Biographia Britannica and was arrested for his work with the Society for Constitutional Information until the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened. In 1808 Rochemont Barbauld became minister, bringing his wife Anna Laetitia Barbauld, the celebrated poet, abolitionist and children's writer admired by Johnson and Wordsworth; after Rochemont's madness and suicide she remained in the congregation until her death in 1825, commemorated by a plaque praising her work for the cause of humanity, peace and justice. The Doctrine of the Trinity Act of 1813 finally made Unitarian belief legal, ending a battle of a century and a half, but victory brought decline: when the minister James Gilchrist published a pamphlet entitled Unitarianism Abandoned, his outraged congregation forced him out and instituted annual elections for the ministry, and at its lowest ebb the church counted nine subscribers. Victorian poverty supplied a new mission. Under Thomas Cromwell, minister from 1839 to 1864, the church built Sunday schools for poor children, a Domestic Mission Society to visit the destitute, a library and savings club, and a day school that ran until the state took over elementary education in 1870. The banker-Egyptologist Samuel Sharpe, nephew of the poet Samuel Rogers, and the pioneering microscopist Andrew Pritchard, friend of Faraday, served as trustee and treasurer, while the congregation petitioned Parliament for Jewish civil rights and the opening of the universities to Dissenters. By the late nineteenth century the Sunday school, judged the best of its class in London, taught two hundred children, requiring the schoolhouse built behind the church in 1887.

The twentieth century tested the church almost to destruction. After its bicentenary high-water mark in 1908 came schism over the New Theology, then the Great War, which took some fifteen members and Sunday scholars and shook liberal religion's faith in human dignity; by 1930 it was whispered that the church could not survive. Yet Sunday services never missed a week, even when a wartime landmine blast wrecked the building and worship moved to the schoolhouse, and post-war ministry built bridges with the Jewish community of north London. By the millennium the congregation had dwindled to half a dozen elderly women, but renewal came with the ministers Cal Courtney, who led a silent overnight vigil before the great march against the Iraq War and revived the Richard Price Memorial Lecture, whose modern speakers have included Will Self, Susie Orbach and Terry Eagleton, and from 2006 Andrew Pakula, a New York-born biologist turned minister who once reversed the collection plate and gave his own money away. In March 2008 the church made history again as the first religious establishment in Britain to refuse to conduct any weddings until same-sex couples enjoyed equal marriage rights, a unanimous stand praised by gay rights campaigners. The tercentenary of 2008 was celebrated under the slogan three hundred years of dissent, and the 250th anniversary of Wollstonecraft's birth in 2009 brought lectures, concerts and a panel of women politicians. A £1.73 million renovation funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund was completed in 2020, lifting the building off the Heritage at Risk Register, and the growing congregation of New Unity, committed to equality of all genders and full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, with no set of mandatory beliefs, keeps the old meeting house at the service of the same restless, hopeful, dissenting spirit that built it.