Hoole Baptist Church

In 1881 Hoole’s population was nearing 3,000 and Ebenezer Baptist Church (then at canal side in Milton Street), hired the Lecture Hall and Reading Room in Peploe Street for Sunday services. A drawing was commissioned in 1980 to show how the building would have looked when it had a front door. There is also a picture of the foundation stone of the Lecture Hall laid by the Rt. Hon. Earl Grosvenor in August 1863.

A newspaper cutting gives details of the first anniversary of the Sunday services in September 1886 (although the Church’s current website suggests that the building was hired from 1883). On the anniversary, there were morning and evening services on Sunday and after an open-air service on Monday, about 100 people sat down to a tea provided by Richards Bros. the bakers and confectioners then located in the shop in Charles Street where Chatwins is now.

The second cutting from September 1897 shows the eleventh anniversary when tea was followed by a lecture on ‘Billy Bray – the Cornish Miner’. The “attendance of Church of England friends whose presence and support were appreciated” is interesting at a time when All Saints Church were ejecting the non-conformists from running the Westminster Schools.

The third cutting tells us what happened at Christmas 1897. Firstly, at Ebenezer Church, and then of the afternoon events in Hoole, a reminder of how poor most of the children of the district were at that time.

In 1911, the Lecture Hall was put up for sale. The Baptist Church bought the property and continued its mission work there as a branch of Grosvenor Park Baptist Church. In 1952 it became Hoole Baptist Church with 32 founding members. It was a growing organisation and in 1965 substantial alterations were made to the building. The Lighthouse Centre was added, and the Church still flourishes today.