Handbook of Birmingham / Prepared for the Members of the British Association, 1886

by British Association for the Advancement of Science

The Jewish Synagogue, in Blucher Street, top of Severn Street, was built in 1856, to supply the place of a smaller synagogue in Severn Street. It cost upwards of £8,000.

The New Church, or Swedenborgians, had for their first chapel the one in Newhall Street (now occupied by the Baptists, q.v.) then, in 1830, removed to a new chapel in Summer Lane, and subsequently, in 1875, to an elegant church, a little way over the Borough boundary, in Wretham Road (Soho Hill).

The Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, who have a chapel in Granville Street (Bath Row), and another in Hockley Hill, just over the Borough boundary.

The Welsh Congregationalists have a chapel in Wheeler Street.

Roman Catholics.—There is no record of any Roman Catholic place of worship in Birmingham from the Reformation until the publication, by James the Second, of the illegal Declaration of Indulgence in 1687. In that year the foundation of a church and convent, dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, was laid near the street still called Masshouse Lane, and probably on the site of the present Church of St. Bartholomew (q.v.). It was scarcely built when it was pulled down at the Revolution of 1688. The priests (who were of the order of St. Francis) removed to a farm house in a lane near Harborne, the approach to which, at the top of Richmond Hill Road, Edgbaston, was known as Masshouse Lane.

The first chapel in the town was the one dedicated to St. Peter, in St. Peter’s Place, a little way out of Broad Street, built in 1786, and a burial ground and schools added and subsequently enlarged.

The next was a chapel in Shadwell Street, built in 1809, and dedicated to St. Chad, which afterwards gave place to St. Chad’s Cathedral, Bath Street, built after the designs of A. Welby Pugin at a cost of £60,000, and consecrated June 22, 1841.

St. Anne’s, Alcester Street, was originally a distillery, and was acquired by the Fathers of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, of whom John Henry (now Cardinal) Newman was one. In 1852, the Fathers removed to the Hagley Road (q.v.), and St. Anne’s became a secular mission.

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hagley Road, Edgbaston. Here, in addition to the Church, is a residence for the Fathers of the Order of St. Philip Neri, and a school for the education of the sons of the Catholic gentry. It is interesting to every educated man as having been for more than a quarter of a century the abode of John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.