NHER 63591 (Monument record) - Site of St Clement's Baptist Chapel and associated burial ground

This is the site of an early 19th-century Baptist chapel, the shell of which forms part of the former industrial building that now occupies the entirety of its plot.

St Clement’s Chapel was established by the Baptist preacher and radical politician Mark Wilks (1748-1819), who first founded a church in the parish of St Paul’s before moving with his congregation to St Clement’s. The foundation stone for this new chapel was apparently lain in 1812, with the building first opening for worship in 1814. Between 1844 and 1864 St Clement’s was the ministry of the Revd Thomas Archibald Wheeler (1821-1898), who was himself a prominent Nonconformist. Mark Wilks is commemorated by a plaque attached to the Friars Quay side of the extant building, which also notes that this chapel came to be known as ‘Wheeler’s Chapel’.
Information from (S1).

The porticoed frontage of the chapel is depicted in a lithograph produced by the Norwich artist James Sillett in 1829, a print of which is held by the Norwich Castle Museum (S2). The Ordnance Survey 1:500 Town Plan map produced in 1885 (S3) shows that the chapel was set back approximately 30m from the Colegate frontage, being accessed via a relatively narrow yard bounded by the outbuildings of No 32 Colegate (then, as it was until recently, a public house) and a number of buildings that previously stood to the west of Nos 22-24 Colegate. At this time there was a narrow strip of garden to the west of the chapel and a larger area of open ground to the south is marked as having been an associated burial ground. A separate building on a slightly different alignment to the south-east was a Sunday School. The chapel itself is labelled as having been able to seat a congregation of 700 although whether its actual attendance was anything like this by the time is unknown.

The chapel appears to have fallen out of use at some point during the early 20th century, with Ordnance Survey maps produced during the 1920s showing what appears to be a single large industrial building on the site of the chapel. This building - most, if not all of which appears to still be standing - occupies not only the site of the chapel itself but also much of the open ground that had formerly surrounded it, including the entirety of the burial ground to the south. This accounts for the chamfered south-west corner of the building, which appears to have been constructed up to, or just short of the north-west to south-east aligned southern boundary of the burial ground. The extant building is believed to incorporate the main shell of the 19th-century chapel, although nothing of its frontage survives.

During the later 20th-century the site was occupied by a glazing works. It has been suggested that prior to this it was a timber yard but this is unconfirmed at present. The site is now only in use as a carpark.
P. Watkins (HES), 25 July 2019.

August 2014. Desk-based Assessment.
Archaeological assessment produced ahead of the proposed redevelopment of this site.
This study concluded that the site lies within an area of high archaeological potential, with significant remains likely to survive within it bounds.
Although the baptist chapel is discussed it should be noted that the surviving fabric within the 20th-century buildings was not recognised.
See report (S4) for further details.
P. Watkins (HES), 11 July 2021.

July 2019. Field Observation.
Brief examination of chapel site.
It is clear that the east and west walls of the main, central section of the extant structure are the original red brick side walls of the 19th-century chapel. Although these survive to their original two-storey height little else of the chapel appears to have been retained - its original tiled roof and front and rear walls all presumably having been removed when the building was converted in the early 20th century. A few pale bricks keyed into the ends of the side walls are now the only traces of the building's north-facing frontage.
The modern extension to the south is only single storey and therefore easily distinguished from the older fabric. Its western wall almost certainly incorporates the boundary wall that formerly defined the western edge of the chapel's grounds. This wall is of three distinct builds. The lowest section is built predominantly of flint cobbles and probably represents the remains of a much older plot boundary (the line of which is continued by a crumbling wall of similar construction visible to the rear of No 32 Colegate). The middle section is built of bricks that appear to be identical to those in the surviving chapel walls, suggesting that the boundary wall was rebuilt and substantially heightened when the chapel was built. The uppermost courses of brick are modern and would have been added when the site was redeveloped during the early 20th century. No early fabric was observed in the angled section of the building's southern wall suggesting that this possibly stopped short of the chapel's southern boundary wall.
See digital photographs (S5) in file.
P. Watkins (HES), 28 July 2019.