[2][3] As early as 1674, only a dozen years after the Great Ejection, the Dissenters in Leeds had built a chapel on the main town square.

Some local gentry, such as Hans Busk, even "maintained a private Unitarian chaplain" or "Preaching Room" on their own estates.

"There was a careful consciousness of middle-class identity and independence...which combined easily with the utilitarian and scientific interests" of the Mill Hill congregation.

The church guidebook describes the early twentieth century as "a small but politically active and very influential congregation led by the Revd Charles Hargrove and Sir James Kitson".

[12] A notable member of the congregation prior to the First World War was Jogendra Nath Sen, who came to study Electrical Engineering at the University of Leeds.

[13] A plaque outside the church observes that the chapel was the first place of worship in Leeds city centre to conduct a same-sex wedding.

He was the uncle-guardian of George Walker, mathematician and activist, who merited inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Priestley recommended as his successor William Wood, who was involved in efforts to remedy the political and educational disabilities of Nonconformists under the Test Acts.

The minister was influential nationally too, jointly editing the Prospective Review for ten years, "the influential voice of the ‘new school’ of English Unitarianism, as against the older tradition of eighteenth-century Priestleyanism"[20] and shaping "the adoption of neo-Gothic architecture" in the new chapels that were being built - what is now called Dissenting Gothic.