In 2012, the chapel became the first place of worship to be granted a civil partnership licence when the law changed in England.[2] During the construction of Manchester Metrolink's second city crossing in the City Zone, 270 bodies from what used to be the chapel's graveyard had to be exhumed and reburied. The work took place from 2014–17.[3]
The Chapel
The building was renamed the Cross Street Chapel and became a Unitarian meeting-house c.1761.[4] It was wrecked by a Jacobite mob in 1715, rebuilt and destroyed during a World War IIair raid in December 1940. A new building was constructed in 1959 and the present structure dates from 1997. The Gaskell Room of the new building houses a collection of memorabilia of novelistElizabeth Gaskell.
Notable ministry and congregation
Urban historian Harold L. Platt notes that in the Victorian period "The importance of membership in this Unitarian congregation cannot be overstated: as the fountainhead of Manchester Liberalism it exerted tremendous influence on the city and the nation for a generation."[5]
^Find a Congregation: Manchester Cross Street, The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (Great Britain), archived from the original on 20 July 2011, retrieved 23 January 2011
^"Manchester Cross Street Chapel gains civil partnership licence". BBC News. 9 March 2012.
^Cox, Charlotte (21 January 2017). "The last of the 270 bodies found beneath Metrolink's city crossing have been once again laid to rest". Manchester Evening News.
^Shercliff WH Manchester: A Short History of its Development, Municipal Information Bureau, Town Hall, Manchester (1960)
^ a bPlatt, Harold L. (2005). Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago. University of Chicago Press. p. 64. ISBN 9780226670768.
^Hotz, Mary Elizabeth (Summer 2000). ""Taught by death what life should be": Elizabeth Gaskell's representation of death in "North and South"". Studies in the Novel. 32 (2): 165–184. JSTOR 29533389.(subscription required)
Further reading
Baker, Thomas (1884). Memorials of a Dissenting Chapel.