The Temporary Chapel, Bede College Durham

A Memory of Durham.

This photograph of 1929 is of special interest to me because of the long, white building in the top left-hand corner of the image.

This was the temporary chapel at the College and served in that capacity from 1925 until the building of the present permanent chapel in 1939. It had been a gift from the Diocese of Durham - perhaps a redundant building from elsewhere. It was licenced for performance of divine service on 24 October 1925. Later photos from the mid-1930s show seem to indicate that it was lengthened to the west by two additional windows.

D. E. Webster wrote in 1983 that the furniture and the organ from the old chapel of 1886 in the main College building were moved to this temporary chapel. This would have been the Harrison & Harrison organ now in the present chapel but could this small temporary building have had space for it and why is there no mention on the Bede College website?

In the summer of 1939, as the new chapel was taking shape, the temporary chapel was dismantled and once again gifted by the Diocese, this time for use as a mission church for a new suburb of South Shields (Horsley Hill/Marsden) under the aegis of the parish of St Peter, Harton. It was re-erected on the edge of a field adjacent to Harton Junior Schools and opened in 1941 with a dedication to St Lawrence. One end of the building was partitioned off to serve as the church hall.

I remember it from this time as I sang in the church choir, served at the altar and played the organ there (not all at the same time!) from 1967 to 1975. I remember the building being much loved and yet much hated in equal measure and very incomodious in terms of heating and ventilation!

Despite long-term intentions to replace it from the 1960s onwards, the church-hall end of the building was rebuilt in 1971 but the bulk of it survived until 1989 when it was finally demolished and rebuilt in brick on the same site. It became the parish church of St Lawrence the Martyr, Horsley Hill, round about that time.

My question to any historians in Durham is: when the temporary chapel was put up in 1925 at Bede College, was it new or had come from elsewhere?

My recollection of this building is that it had nothing of the 1920s about it and an air of the Victorian. The pews and internal wooden panelling were darkly varnished and, at a guess, I would have dated it to the 1880s. I am wondering, consequently, whether it had come from another site, perhaps previously used as another chapel or mission church elsewhere in the Diocese of Durham.

Does anyone know of such a church building being replaced in or before 1925?