Hinde Street Methodist Church

Hinde Street Methodist Church in Hinde Street, Marylebone, London, is Grade II listed with Historic England. It was built 1807-10 and rebuilt in the 1880s. The church provides three services of worship on Sundays (at 10am, 11am and 6.30pm). It adheres to an open, questioning and socially aware Christianity concerned with the perennial task: ‘to serve the present age’, as once described by Charles Wesley. The church supports two Christian communities attached to it, and a programme of work with students and young adults. It runs a weekly drop-in for homeless people, a Winter Night Shelter, a social and study group and a lunch hour meditation, and is part of the West London Mission, running seven social work projects working with the homeless and marginalised. It became, in 2015, a member of the Inclusive Church movement. Its building is used during weekdays by 69 different 12-step groups, with around 800 people coming for support and spiritual guidance every week.

Methodists had a presence in London's West End from the earliest days of the Methodist movement. A leased chapel in West Street (which can still be seen, just off Cambridge Circus) was used from 1743, and John and Charles Wesley themselves preached there. From 1761, or earlier, there was also a centre in Mayfair, the western geographical extremity of London at that time. From 1785 to 1801 a preaching room in Davies Street was leased, after which, with membership growing rapidly, the Society took over and rebuilt a nearby chapel in Chandler Street (now Weighhouse Street).

In 1808 land close by in Marylebone was acquired to build an even larger chapel, on part of the site now occupied by the present Hinde Street building. It was then a swampy piece of ground by the Tyburn stream which ran down the present route of Marylebone Lane. The architect, Rev. William Jenkins, was one of Wesley’s itinerant preachers who combined preaching with chapel design. The chapel, opened in 1810, held around 900, had two galleries and acquired the nickname ‘The Dutch Oven’ because of its shape.

Charles Wesley had lived nearby in Chesterfield Street, Marylebone (now Wheatley Street), and a son and daughter were members of class in the new chapel.

Hinde Street's West End location attracted the foremost preachers in Methodism, and its pulpit gained a formidable reputation. Membership peaked at 1,100 in 1844 at a time of intense evangelism.

One of the church's principal areas of service to the local community was the Sunday School. Established when the first chapel was built in 1810, it was the first Sunday School in Marylebone and attracted 758 members by 1817, with some 500 children attending in the basement schoolroom on a typical Sunday. In its early days it provided invaluable instruction in reading and writing especially for the poorer children of the neighbourhood, prior to the provision of universal state education.

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