| Description | The volume comprises a printed history of the Old Meeting House, Birmingham, as well as providing a general overview of the history of Nonconformity in the region. There is also a large amount of illustrated and manuscript material interleaved in the volume, and may have been compiled as a unique scrapbook for the benefit of the Trustees and subscribers of the church. Additional material includes a printed plan of the land and streets around the chapel when it was erected in 1689; prints depicting the interior and exterior of the chapel; an inventory of property belonging to the chapel destroyed during the Priestley Riots of July 1791 (for more information about the riots see the description of the Priestley papers in the records of the New Meeting House in catalogue record UC 2/15); a history of the Turton family taken from the 'Rowley Regis Church Magazine'; current seating plans for the Old Meeting House chapel; an engraved print of the minister, Hugh Hutton, dated 1842; facsimiles of autographs (with some portrait prints) of ministers of the Old and New Meetings; plans of the burial ground, chapel and other buildings; copies of memorial inscriptions on graves situated in burial ground, with plot numbers referred to in enclosed burial ground plans; and printed reports, orders of service, press cuttings and other correspondence and papers. There are also lists of civic officials and mayors of Birmingham buried in the Old Meeting House burial ground, providing interesting evidence of the link between Unitarianism and municipal government in Birmingham during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |