Building record MDS 183 - Former Baptist Chapel

2015: The red-brick former Baptist chapel in the hamlet of Mendlesham Green adjoins Chapel Cottage on the northern side of Green Road, approximately 2.5 km SSW of Mendlesham village. The local church was founded in 1839 by a breakaway congregation of just eight individuals including Samuel Steggalls who owned the garden in which the new chapel was built. According to a published interpretation of the 19th century minute books Steggalls suggested that his cottage should form one of the chapel’s walls. The tithe map of 1839 shows the newly built chapel as a small structure of identical width to the cottage, yet the earliest surviving fabric projects by 2.75 m beyond its rear corner and contains two blocked original windows. It seems likely that the present brick building replaced a smaller predecessor as the congregation expanded rapidly in the 1840s, with the minister reporting attendances of 300 in 1851. A rare painted inscription above the entrance door (protected within the porch) reads: ‘JIREH CHAPEL Particular Baptists Open'd June 16th 1839’, but this almost certainly relates to a previous structure on the site rather than the present. ‘Jireh’ is an alternative form of Jehovah, and Particular Baptists were a Calvin-influence sect which split from the more liberal General Baptists in the early-17th century. The building’s facade is much as depicted in a photograph of 1909 and remains picturesque despite the replacement of its sash windows and the unsympathetic repointing of its brickwork. The porch is a replacement of the 1980s. A lean-to extension was added to the rear in the 1860s to accommodate an impressive gallery with moulded fascia boards and arcade capitals supported on cylindrical iron columns, but the Victorian benches were imported from elsewhere in the 1950s. A baptismal tank of 20th century appearance survives beneath the floorboards in the centre of the building, and there is evidence of twin entrances and a different western gallery before the 1860s alterations. Given the extent of its changes the chapel does not meet the strict English Heritage criteria for listing, but remains a Heritage Asset of considerable historic interest. Human burials surround the building on all three sides (S1).