Robertson Street United Reformed Church

Robertson Street United Reformed Church is a large and richly detailed Victorian church in the centre of Hastings, the seaside town and borough in East Sussex. Built in 1885 as a Congregational church and later part of the United Reformed Church, it is a Grade II listed building, one of the grandest Nonconformist churches in the town. Though its original congregation closed in 2012, the building lives on as an active place of worship, now home to the Pentecostal His Place Church, as well as a theatre and community hub.

The church grew out of the energetic evangelical work of Daniel Smith, who founded the congregation in 1856, and a first Gothic Revival chapel was built on the site in 1857. As the congregation outgrew that building — and as it began to need extensive repairs — the Reverend C. New, one of the most important figures in Hastings Congregationalism, led the effort to fund and build a far larger church. The neighbouring property was bought to allow the expansion, and the contract was awarded to the builder John Howell at a cost of around £7,090. While the new church was under construction, the congregation worshipped in various places around the town, including the Gaiety Theatre and the pavilion on Hastings Pier. The memorial stone was laid on 11 September 1884 by James Spicer, a leading Congregationalist, before a large crowd that included the Mayor and ministers from across the district, and the completed church was dedicated on 7 October 1885.

The building was designed by Henry Ward (1854–1927), the architect responsible for many of the most important buildings in Hastings, including its Town Hall. Constructed of coursed ragstone with ashlar and terracotta dressings, with oak doors and steps of York stone, it stands between Robertson Street and Cambridge Road, and makes ingenious use of its cramped site with a split-level arrangement — part of the gallery even occupies a flying freehold over the adjacent alleyway. A monumental staircase rises from the Robertson Street entrance to a horseshoe-shaped gallery of curved pews with under-pew heating, seating in all around 1,100 people. The galleries, pews, ceiling and roof were of pitch pine, the walls finished in Parian cement, and — remarkably for its time — at its dedication the church was the only Nonconformist place of worship in the town lit by electricity. Its organ by Forster and Andrews is unusually mounted, its ornamented pipes set above the altar behind the minister.

The Reverend New also founded other Congregational chapels in the villages north of Hastings, at Sedlescombe and Robertsbridge, the latter maintaining links with Robertson Street for much of the twentieth century. The church saw periods of both decline and dramatic recovery: membership had fallen sharply by the 1940s, but under the Reverend A. E. Gould from 1945 it grew by nearly 400 members within a decade, becoming a noted centre of evangelism with particularly strong youth and children's work. In the 1970s, under the Reverend Brian Bowyer, a mammoth fundraising effort repaired serious faults in the roof, allowing the congregation to return to the sanctuary from the hall below.

But the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought the national decline in Nonconformist congregations. With its membership falling and the building requiring expensive repairs, and with three other United Reformed churches in the town, the congregation concluded that its members might best serve the wider church by dispersing, and Robertson Street United Reformed Church closed on 30 December 2012, after more than a century and a half as an engine of evangelism in Hastings.

The story did not end there. Since December 2013 the building has been owned by His Place Church, a Pentecostal fellowship founded in 1984 that had outgrown its former premises, and it is once more a thriving place of worship under the Reverend Chris Sears. Alongside the church, the building now houses a café, a "safe space", mental health support and community groups, and the Opus Theatre, whose horseshoe-shaped auditorium offers excellent acoustics for concerts and lectures. Major fundraising continues to repair the windows, stonework and ironwork of this important building.

From its founding by Daniel Smith and the great church raised by Henry Ward in 1885, through its years as a Congregational and United Reformed church, to its new life as a Pentecostal congregation and community arts venue, Robertson Street church remains a landmark of faith and gathering at the heart of Hastings.