Qualla: Newington Green Unitarian Church

Newington Green Unitarian Church: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. Mary Wollstonecraft was twenty-five, broke, and running a school for girls when she first walked into the brick chapel on Newington Green. The year was 1784, and the minister inside - the political radical Richard Price - was about to do something that would change history through his protege. He listened to her. The chapel itself looked unimpressive: a plain rectangular brick building with a hipped tile roof, financed in 1708 with £300 from a goldsmith named Edward Harrison. The pews were modest, the architecture restrained, the congregation small. Yet the conversations happening here would help give Britain its first feminist treatise, fuel arguments about the French Revolution, and welcome American founders like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Today a banner outside proclaims it the birthplace of feminism. The building lives up to the claim more than its plain walls suggest.

Image: CC BY-SA 2.5

Newington Green Unitarian Church: A Refuge for the Excluded

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Digidavey, CC BY-SA 3.0. The chapel exists because seventeenth-century England did not want it to. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, a series of laws known as the Clarendon Code made life difficult for anyone who would not conform to the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity drove around 2,...

Image: Digidavey | CC BY-SA 3.0

Newington Green Unitarian Church: Richard Price and the Visitors from America

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carbon Caryatid, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dr Richard Price arrived in 1758 and lived next door, at No. 54 the Green, in a brick terrace dating from 1658 - still the oldest surviving brick terrace in London. From this small house Price reshaped Anglo-American political thought. He was a polymath who wrote on probability, ...

Image: Carbon Caryatid | CC BY-SA 3.0

Newington Green Unitarian Church: How a Schoolmistress Became a Philosopher

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wollstonecraft was a lifelong Anglican when she moved her struggling school for girls from Islington to Newington Green in 1784. A wealthy widow named Mrs Burgh found her a house and helped fill it with twenty pupils. The Unitarians of the chapel did not try to convert her. They ...

Image: David Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newington Green Unitarian Church: Decline, Wars, and Slow Recovery

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danny Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Legal victories did not preserve the church. By 1813, when the Doctrine of the Trinity Act formally legalised Unitarian worship, the great battles for Dissenter rights were largely won, and a strange exhaustion set in. The congregation dropped, at one point, to nine subscribers. ...

Image: Danny Robinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newington Green Unitarian Church: Still Speaking

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benjamin West, Public domain. The church has refused to be a museum. In 2002 a young Irish pastor named Cathal Courtney revitalised the congregation; he later led a silent vigil before the Iraq War march. His successor, Andrew Pakula - an American with an MIT doctorate in biology who came to ministry via a ca...

Image: Benjamin West | Public domain