Lady Glenorchy's Church

The church lay midway between the orphan hospital to the north-west, and the medieval Trinity College Kirk to the south-east.

[1] When the building was largely complete, Lady Glenorchy wrote to the Moderator of the Presbytery of Edinburgh in April 1774 seeking the approval of the Presbytery and explaining that the church was expressly aimed at the poor of the city and the alleviation of the overcrowded city churches.

The Presbytery was unanimously in favour of Lady Glenorchy's position and in May 1774 the first service of the church was taken by Rev Robert Walker of St Giles' Cathedral and Rev Dr John Erskine of Greyfriars Kirk.

The Edinburgh Presbytery appealed this ruling to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland which reversed it.

This left the way clear for Lady Glenorchy, in 1776, to invite Dr Thomas Snell Jones, a Wesleyan Methodist, to accept the charge of her church.

The constitution was revised by Act of Parliament in 1837 and the church was then made a quoad sacra parish.

[4] The church first appears on Andrew Bell's map of 1773 which illustrates a simple box roughly similar in size to the adjacent Trinity College Church, with an entrance porch on the west side in the traditional pattern.

Due to protracted litigation, it was not until 1856 that the Roxburgh Place Chapel, which had been owned by the Relief Church but which had passed into private ownership, was purchased as a replacement.

The photo (as seen on this page) is misidentified in some sources as "the orphan hospital", which was demolished at the same time having relocated to the Dean Orphanage in the early 1830s.