Essex Street Chapel

This was completed by 1778, with financial support from Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer,[2] founder of the Hellfire Club, and Thomas Brand Hollis, political radical.

Support was immediately given him by distinguished English Presbyterian ministers such as Richard Price, who had his own church in Newington Green, and Joseph Priestley, who among other things discovered oxygen.

Unitarian beliefs were against the law until the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813, but legal difficulties with the authorities were overcome with the help of barrister John Lee, who later became Attorney-General.

The inaugural service, on 17 April 1774, was reviewed as far afield as Leeds: "The congregation was respectable and numerous, and seemed to be particularly pleased with the spirit of moderation, candour and christian benevolence of the preacher whose sermon was perfectly well adapted to the occasion.

As long ago as 1867, Rev Robert Spears had led the formation of a Unitarian congregation a couple of miles to the west; this group had grown and moved several times, but had no home.

Sir James Clarke Lawrence, Lord Mayor of London and Liberal MP, purchased and donated some land at Kensington Gravel Pits (now Palace Gardens Terrace), and a temporary corrugated iron church had been built.

[12] The space was hired out for concerts and public meetings; for many years the Fabian Society met there, for example, and the Christadelphians held their AGM at Essex Hall.

Public meetings could become heated: when the American Prohibitionist William "Pussyfoot" Johnson spoke at Essex Hall in 1919, he was abducted by medical students, and, off the premises, blinded by a missile.

From the night of the Doodlebug raid until the completion of construction in 1958 – fourteen years—the work that normally took place in Essex Hall was displaced to some spare rooms at Dr Williams's Library in Gordon Square.