| Description | It is thought that a small Quaker community established in Birmingham in the 1650s, after Quakerism had been brought there in 1654 by the itinerant preacher Richard Farnsworth (n.d. [17th century]), one of the 'Valiant Sixty' (a group of over 60 itinerant preachers originating from the north of England who spread the ideas of Quakerism throughout Great Britain ). George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, is first recorded as having been to the town in 1655, and visited again in 1659 and 1667.
Initially meetings for worship were held in private houses. Like elsewhere, these meetings were met with some persecution. A congregation of Friends was broken up at the house of William Reynolds in 1659 and again at the house of William Bayley in 1660. Robert Rotheram presented at Quarter Sessions in 1678 for keeping a conventicle (a religious meeting held unlawfully) at his house in Aston, and there were further conventicles held in Birmingham in 1684. In 1681, a house and garden in New Hall Lane were conveyed to trustees by a Quaker, Joseph Hopkins, for use as a meeting house and burial ground, and it is likely that the building had been used for this purpose for a number of years prior to this. New Hall Lane became known as Bull Lane (and later Monmouth Street) and was located at the end of what is now Colmore Row. It was located roughly where the entrance to the Great Western Arcade is today. In 1689, the meeting house was registered at Quarter Sessions as a place for dissenters meetings and belonging to Jonathan Frith. At this time, there were thought to be around 200-225 Friends who were members of Birmingham Meeting, coming from Birmingham, Aston, Castle Bromwich, Little Bromwich, Deritend, Saltley, Hockley, Kings Norton, Kings Heath, Moseley, Smethwick and Yardley.
The meeting house on New Hall Lane/Monmouth Street needed frequent repairs, so in 1702/3, it was decided to build a new meeting house, paid for by members of the meeting. This was on Bull Street, on the site of where the current meeting house entrance gates now stand. The Monmouth Street meeting house was turned back into a residential house until 1726 when it was demolished and the site was sold, but the burial ground continued to be used until the mid 18th century, together with land behind the new meeting house which had been purchased for use as a burial ground. An Act of Parliament resulted in the sale of the Monmouth Street burial ground to the Great Western Railway Company for £2000 in 1851 for the construction of a railway cutting for the line from London Paddington to Snowhill Station. Birmingham Meeting received an additional £1000 in compensation to remove the remains of over 300 Friends who were re-interred in a vault in the burial ground on Bull Street in the same year. Most of the proceeds received from the sale of the old Monmouth Street burial ground were used to buy two houses in Old Square in 1853.
By the 1770s, the congregation felt that the meeting house was no longer fit for purpose. Whereas it had been located towards the edge of the town at the start of the 18th century, seventy years later, it found itself on what had become the main shopping street and one of the busiest streets in the town. To limit the noise which could be heard inside the meeting house, the windows facing the street were bricked up in 1773 and the windows on the burial ground side were replaced with arched sash-windows. The meeting house had also become too small for its expanding congregation. As Birmingham had become more industrialised, creating more jobs, its population had increased and the town had expanded. This included an influx of Friends from other places across the country. A gallery was built at the southern end of the meeting house to provide additional space and the interior was panelled with oak. There was further expansion of the meeting house and of the women's meeting room in 1778. In 1792 additional alterations were made to the seats under the gallery to allow another row of seating to be squeezed in. Proposals in 1806 to build a new meeting house were not taken up and instead the building was extended again with further extensions taking place every ten years until 1857.
Birmingham's first purpose built meeting house was finally replaced with a new much larger building, designed by architect Thomas Plevin, with a seating capacity of 500 on the same site in 1857. It was set back from Bull Street with a courtyard in front. Two years later, land was acquired in Upper Priory and in 1861, Priory Rooms were built by George and John E. Baker to provide space for a Sunday school for girls and adult school for women. In 1879, as part of the Corporation's Improvement Scheme, Friends entered into an agreement with Birmingham Corporation in which two houses owned by the Religious Society of Friends in Old Square were given up to the Corporation and the Corporation provided land in Dr Johnson Passage next to the Priory Rooms in exchange. This allowed a building to be constructed in 1880 to provide the Friends Reading Society with a library and committee room, a Monthly Meeting office, and caretakers rooms to be created.
The boundaries of the site at Bull Street were altered in 1930 in negotiations with Birmingham Corporation and Lewis's department store to provide Lewis's with more space, and in the following year the meeting house was demolished to be replaced by the current building seating more than 500, designed by Hubert Lidbetter (1885-1966), which opened in 1933. During the Second World War, Priory Rooms, which had been damaged by bombing in 1940, was leased to the City Council for use as a civic restaurant until the end of the war, and subsequently demolished in the years after the war.
There were further changes to boundaries in the 1960s when land was exchanged between the City Council, Lewis's department store and Friends, as a result of the redevelopment of Birmingham city centre and the building of the inner ring road. In 1963-4, a new building, named Doctor Johnson House designed by Clifford Tee and Gale, was constructed, providing Friends with space for offices and rooms to let as a source of income. By 1994, the building was in need of considerable renovation and Friends agreed to the demolition of the building as part of the City Council's redevelopment plans for Colmore Circus. Part of the site was leased for the construction of One Colmore Square, and the remaining graves in the burial ground were reinterred at Lodge Hill Cemetery in 2001. Priory Rooms, a basement extension to the Meeting House, and a new courtyard were built in 2002, providing a conference space for income generation which is used to support Central England Area Meeting and other Quaker organisations connected to Central England Area Meeting.
Until 1872, the meeting at Bull Street was the only Quaker meeting in Birmingham. By 1851, its membership was 380 and attendance at meetings for worship is thought to have been 272. By 1892, when a number of Friends had moved away from Bull Street Meeting to attend one of the other meetings which had sprung up across the suburbs of the city, attendance at meeting for worship was thought to be 300. Membership reached its peak in 1915, when there were 529 members at Bull Street. By 1950, the average attendance at meetings was thought to be 60, although in 1957 across the 13 meetings which were located within the city's boundaries, membership was 1250. As Bull Street Meeting was the only meeting in the city for such a long time, the records contain references to members of prominent Quaker families of Birmingham such as the Lloyd, Cadbury, Galton, Sturge, Southall, Albright, Pumphrey, Gibbins, Grubb, Impey, Wilson and Tangye families among others.
See SF/3/4/14/2 'Bull Streeet Friends I have Known' for information about prominent members of the meeting.
See SF/2/1/1/10 for trust and property records relating to Bull Street Local/Preparative Meeting.
See SF/2/1/1/12 for records relating to Friends Reading Society.
See SF/2/1/1/13 for records relating to Severn Street and Priory Adult First Day Schools.
See SF/3 for a description of the functions of the Local/Preparative Meeting. |