Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House
The Unitarian Meeting House on Friars Street, Ipswich, is a Grade I timber-framed dissenting chapel of 1699–1700, among the least altered purpose-built meeting houses of its date in England.
- Location
- Ipswich, Suffolk
- Country
- England
- County
- Suffolk
- City / town
- Ipswich
- Address
- Friars Street, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP1 1TG
- Postcode
- IP1 1TG
- Built
- 1699–1700; restored 1900 and later
- Architect
- Joseph Clark of Ipswich (house carpenter); 1900 restoration by Ronald P Jones
- Denomination
- Unitarian Church
- Grade
- I
- Style
- Late 17th-century dissenting meeting house
- Materials
- Timber frame with plastered walls; tiled double-pitched roof
- Grid reference
- TM 161 443
- Opening hours
- The building is open between May and September from 12noon to 4pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
- Access
- Accessible toilets in church. Level access to the main areas
Overview
Historic England lists a very fine seventeenth-century meeting house, opened in 1700 for a congregation founded in 1672, square in plan with plastered walls, two storeys and a tiled double-pitched roof. The upper windows light a gallery on three sides. North and east fronts have mullioned-and-transomed casements with leaded lights and eight-panel doors in stucco architraves with modillioned pediments; oval windows with spider-web leading sit above the north doors. The interior retains a panelled gallery, original box pews, a carved three-decker pulpit (traditionally associated with Grinling Gibbons) and a brass chandelier.
The congregation's own history records a contract of 5 August 1699 with Ipswich house carpenter Joseph Clark for a building sixty by fifty feet, with a double roof on four columns, at £256 14s 6d plus £96 for galleries. The opening service was held on 26 April 1700. Ronald P. Jones directed a restoration in 1900. Later fabric works include 1930, 1954, 1975 and a rolling programme from 1988; a major repair completed in 2021 removed unsympathetic steel and cement and re-rendered in lime. The meeting house is open on selected days from May to September.