Quakers and their meeting houses: Building a picture of a religious group through its architecture

Such meetings do not require a special building or room, and early gatherings were held in houses, barns, and out of doors. Every year, Friends from all over the world congregate at Firbank Fell, in Cumbria, to commemorate the open-air gathering of Whitsun Week 1652, when George Fox (1624-1691) – one of the leading lights of the movement – spoke for three hours from a rock that is now known as Fox’s Pulpit and marked by a plaque.

From there, Fox travelled to Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston, in Cumbria. The property was owned by Thomas Fell (1598-1658), who was the MP for Lancaster, an Assize Judge, and one-time Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Though Fell was not himself a Quaker, his wife Margaret (1614-1702, who was to marry George Fox in 1669) was the movement’s chief administrator and fundraiser, and is credited with being the driving force behind what was to become an organised national movement. Judge Fell would sit in an adjoining room during the Quaker meetings held at the hall to afford them some protection by his presence from prosecution and arrest by local magistrates. Swarthmoor Hall is today a listed building (Grade II) owned by British Quakers, and open to the public as one of the earliest surviving examples of a domestic meeting house.

Acts of silence

Quakers suffered disproportionately from the so-called ‘Clarendon Code’, the Acts of Parliament promoted by the Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), intended to crush religious dissent. The Quaker Act of 1662 saw many leading Friends fined and imprisoned because, in accordance with the New Testament injunction ‘swear not at all’ (Matthew 5: 34-37), they refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to the monarch. The Conventicle Act of 1664 then prohibited all religious gatherings of more than four people except for family gatherings and Anglican services.

The Quaker practice of worshipping in silence made it difficult for the authorities to convict them for active worship, but some 15,000 Quakers were nevertheless imprisoned during the reign of Charles II. Some were whipped, pilloried, and branded, and around 450 died as a direct result of the punitive conditions they endured.

The Quaker Act of 1662 saw many leading Friends fined and imprisoned because… they refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to the monarch.

Remarkably, in defiance of all these restrictions, more than 200 meeting houses were opened for worship between 1660 and 1689, and 18 of these survive, though altered over the centuries. About half of them used existing buildings, like the cottage that was converted into a meeting house in Broad Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1663 (now Grade II listed and still in use by the Friends). In 1668, London’s first purpose-built meeting house was constructed in the City of London, at Gracechurch Street, despite the authorities elsewhere London – in Southwark and Stepney – ordering houses used for Quaker meetings to be demolished.

The oldest surviving purpose-built meeting house was constructed in Hertford in 1670, the same year that a new Conventicle Act was passed prohibiting all non-Anglican meetings, with heavy fines for those who attended or preached at them, or who allowed their property to be used for such meetings.

The Hertford meeting house looks like a pair of plain red-brick town houses. It was probably designed deliberately to avoid attracting attention and to be capable of being converted to dwellings if necessary. In the 1680s, doors and benches were burned during a period of persecution, and the building was left derelict for a time before being repaired. Today its interior fittings, including benches, moveable panelling, and screens, largely date from the 18th century.

Faith builds

With the 1689 Act of Toleration, under William and Mary, dissenters were allowed to worship freely for the first time in premises registered with magistrates, though they were still excluded from public office and from university life, and still subject to imprisonment for refusing to pay tithes. From now on, meeting houses began to make their mark on the landscape with the result that there are now just over 450 meeting houses in England, many of them of great historic interest, as being well-preserved examples of 17th- to 19th-century vernacular architecture.

Many were built by local groups of Quakers using their own labour, and they are notable for their functional but elegant interior fittings. Nearly a third of them are listed (seven Grade I, 44 Grade II, and 50 Grade II), and all of them have been visited and recorded as part of a national survey carried out between 2014 and 2016 by the Architectural History Practice. The Quaker Meeting Houses Heritage Project was funded partly by the Religious Society of Friends in Britain and partly by Historic England as part of the latter’s wider project called Taking Stock, which aims to assess the heritage significance of all non-Anglican places of worship.

One outcome of the project is Chris Skidmore’s book (see ‘Further reading’ below) in which the former Chair of Historic England, Sir Laurie Magnus, writing in the Foreword, describes meeting houses as ‘not flamboyant or attention-seeking’ but, in line with Quaker values and practices, ‘modest places that speak of thoughtful design’. He adds that all those involved in the recording project have been ‘inspired by what has been discovered and touched by the lives of those of whom these buildings speak’. It is rare that architectural historians speak in such emotional terms, but there is something poignant about Quaker meeting houses that encourages spiritual engagement.

This is, after all, what they were designed to do: both externally and internally, they reflected the unostentatious form of worship they were built to accommodate, and the aesthetic of plainness and the lack of visual stimulus is deliberate, designed so that members of the congregation should not be distracted from their spiritual thoughts. Most meeting houses are rectangular in plan, with windows in one long wall and the gable ends to light the internal meeting space, but set high in the wall to prevent the outside world causing a distraction. The use of a single entrance – rather than the separate entrances for men and women found in other dissenting places of worship – symbolises the fundamental Quaker belief in the equality of all people. The entrance leads directly into the meeting space or into a lobby similar to the screens passage in a medieval hall, dividing the building into two parts.

Despite the common entrance, men and women sat apart in the meeting hall, with its simple seating formed of free-standing chairs or benches. One or two rows of fixed benches, raised on a dais, provided seating for the elders, or overseers. These were respected members of the community who were responsible for the conduct of meetings and for the spiritual welfare of members.

Stepping up

An early development in Quaker practice was the realisation that some members of the community had a particular gift for ‘spoken ministry’, and these ‘ministers’ were provided with a separate stand so that they could be heard more easily when they spoke. In its simplest form, the stand was a pulpit-like structure located in the centre of the seating for the elders, but in time the fixed seating came to occupy a whole wall of the meeting house with multiple tiers, the highest of which was reserved for the minister.

Ministers were often peripatetic, travelling round the country to speak at Quaker gatherings: some meeting houses have mounting blocks and stables for horses and carriages, as well as cloakrooms, retiring rooms, and lavatories – all innovations for their time. Women could be ministers as well as men (it was hearing of a female Quaker preacher in the 1790s that provoked Samuel Johnson’s derogatory remark that ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’).

Many early meeting houses are equipped with various kinds of ingenious hinged or folding screens or panels that could be raised and secured to ceiling hooks. These were used to subdivide the meeting room when it was not in use for worship. Separate rooms were needed for the monthly business meetings, in which men and women met simultaneously, but separately. Despite the emphasis on universal human equality and the role of women as speakers and ministers at meetings, unparalleled in any other congregation at the time, Quaker business was dominated by men until the 19th century.

Seating, screens, and wainscoting were deliberately made without ornament and usually left unpainted as a physical counterpart to the Quaker values of plain speech and plain dress. On the other hand, good-quality workmanship was respected, and many furnishings of the 17th and 18th centuries have similar aesthetic qualities to those sought by Arts and Crafts designers in the early 20th century. Equally innovative was the provision of stoves or fireplaces and chimneys to keep the meeting house warm – a distinctive feature of Quaker buildings at a time when places of worship were generally unheated.

The well-preserved meeting house at Farfield, near Addingham, West Yorkshire, is a good example of this early type of building. Constructed in 1689 on land donated by Anthony Myers, the lord of the manor and yeoman farmer owner of nearby Farfield Hall, the building is little changed and resembles a late 17th- century Yorkshire stone cottage, largely built of rubble, with mullioned windows and a stone slate roof supported by a single king-post truss. The floor is stone flagged and, apart from some loose benches, the only fitting is the oak stand under the west window, where visiting ministers would address the meeting. In contrast to the plainness of the rest of the building, this has a central balustrade with turned balusters.

Equally distinctive is the row of five table tombs honouring the Myers family in the burial ground alongside the meeting house, a rare example of the kind of ostentatious commemorative practice that Quakers usually discouraged (but also a reminder that the Quaker movement attracted landowners and public figures, as well as people prominent in science, commerce, and industry). The building is now looked after by another group of Friends – in this case the excellent Friends of Friendless Churches (see ‘Odd Socs’ in CA 215), whose website has photographs and visiting details.

A room with a view

Where land was available, meeting houses were built in prominent locations. Quakers set great store by worshipping openly as a way of attracting members. At Alton, in Hampshire, the meeting house of 1672 was built within sight of the parish church, almost in an act of defiance in the face of Quaker persecution. Having celebrated the building’s 350th anniversary in 2022, the current congregation claims that it is the second oldest purpose-built meeting house in the world that is still in use (the last qualification is important because there are earlier purpose-built meeting houses that have not survived or that have been converted to other uses). That local Quakers were successful in gaining support is indicated by the addition of a balustraded upper gallery in 1690 to accommodate an increasing number of worshippers.

Another feature at Alton is the attached cottage, which became increasingly common as a meeting house adjunct, to accommodate a resident warden. In the absence of a separate dwelling, a member of the community would be allowed to live in the meeting house itself, and this dual use occasionally led to friction. The meeting minutes for 1692 at Winchmore Hill recorded that: ‘widow French is to be acquainted that Friends are troubled to see that she does not put things out of sight during the meeting time [such] as her pots and things upon the shelves and cheeses on the beams, which are for all to see’.

Several writers on the subject of Quaker meeting houses have commented on the uniformity of plan, style, and furnishings that rapidly developed without any instruction from the movement’s leaders. There were, of course, variations in the building materials, from the timber-framing of Almeley Wootton meeting house of 1672 in Herefordshire, and the red brick of Worcester (1701) or Jordans (1688), Buckinghamshire, where William Penn (1644-1718), founder of Pennsylvania, is buried, to the striking whitewashed cob under a thatched roof of Cornwall’s Come-to-Good meeting house. But internally a Quaker meeting house is nearly always recognisable as such, even when more architecturally ambitious designs started to appear in the 18th century.

These new-style meeting rooms are particularly found in urban settings where meeting houses built for larger congregations reflected wider trends in architectural style – some were now even designed by a professional architect or surveyor, though often one from the Quaker community. Such was the case with London’s main meeting house, which moved from the earlier site at Gracechurch Street to Devonshire House, off Bishopsgate. There, in 1794, the Quaker architect John Bevans built two new meeting houses with a horseshoe-shaped plan, one for men and one for women, each capable of holding 1,000 people.

Also serving as the international headquarters of the Quaker movement, the Devonshire House site was extended on numerous occasions until, by 1910, it consisted of a warren of dimly lit offices, committee rooms, library, and archive store, and a decision was made to move to a new site. There followed a 16-year saga (partly resulting from the interruption of the First World War) while various sites were considered for a new headquarters building: one was the site of today’s Senate House, while another was the Tavistock Square site now occupied by the British Medical Association. Eventually the current site on Euston Road was purchased in 1923 and most of the garden on the site disappeared under Friends House, designed by the Dublin-born Quaker architect Hubert Lidbetter (1885-1966). The result was described by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘well-mannered Classical building’.

Notably northern

A certain amount of Yorkshire pride can be detected in the construction in 1817 of a large new meeting house in Friargate, York, in Classical style to the designs of Watson and Pritchett. It was capable of seating 1,300, with galleries on three sides and a large stand occupying the whole of the fourth side. This has since been replaced, but we have an exhaustive description in a book published in 1820 by a member of the building committee, William Alexander, called Observations on the Construction and Fitting Up of Meeting-houses, in which he makes clear his belief that the York building is superior in many ways to London’s Devonshire House.

That book is notable for being the first of several, written by members of the different non-conformist communities, with advice on chapel and meeting-house design at the start of what became a century-long boom in the construction of new places of worship by all denominations – a boom that has left us with a legacy of chapels that are no longer used for worship and that perhaps always were overly ambitious. Chris Skidmore notes wryly that the massive Friargate meeting house can rarely have been full: York only had 155 Quakers in 1820, and only 273 attendees were recorded on census Sunday, 30 March 1851.

Manchester had a larger body of Quakers than most towns and cities, and its meeting house, with seating for 600 on the ground floor and a further 1,300 in the galleries, was built in 1828 to the designs of local Quaker architect Richard Lane, who modelled it on one of the Greek temples illustrated in The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Inside, the building is still clearly derived from the meeting houses of the 17th century, with the focal point being the two-tiered minister’s stand at the far end, with a sounding board above and a partition that could be used to divide the room in two, with half sinking into the floor and half rising into the roof.

The scale of the minister’s stand at Manchester was symptomatic of small but significant changes in Quaker practice, with an increasing emphasis on preaching and congregational prayer over silent worship. By 1896, men and women were no longer segregated, and families could sit together rather than being separated. The influence of the ministers began to wane and, in 1924, London finally ended the practice of ‘recording’ (recognising) the class of members who had dominated worship for the best part of 300 years.

As others followed, stands were no longer provided in new buildings. Indeed, as early as 1892, at Birkenhead, a new meeting house was built without minister’s stand, and in 1893, at Edgbaston, fixed seating was completely absent. The Bournville meeting house built by Quakers Richard and George Cadbury in 1905 is almost indistinguishable from a school or village hall, though (uniquely for a British meeting house) it does have a large organ, installed in 1915.

Ironically then, just as the Arts and Crafts movement was emphasising those virtues of artisanal design that had inspired so much Quaker practice, the Quakers themselves had begun to move away – but not forever: Chris Skidmore’s well-illustrated account ends on a high note with some distinctive and imaginative new designs from the 20th and 21st centuries, including a refurbished meeting room at Friends House in London, filled with light from a ceiling aperture that can be opened to the sky for contemplation of the light that is a central concept in Quaker worship as a metaphor for God and for that ‘inner light’ that is in everyone.

Further reading: 
Chris Skidmore, Quakers and Their Meeting Houses (Liverpool University Press for Historic England, ISBN 978-1800857209, £39.20).