Cross Street Chapel is a Unitarian church in central Manchester, England. It is a member of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella organisation for British Unitarians.
History
The Act of Uniformity 1662 imposed state control on religion by regulating the style of worship in the Church of England. However, many clergy rejected the restrictions, and of the 2000 ministers who were ejected from the established church, Henry Newcome established his own congregation that same year. The "Dissenters' Meeting House" was opened in 1694 and holds a special place in the growth of nonconformism within the city.
In 2012, the chapel became the first place of worship to be granted a civil partnership licence when the law changed in England. 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.
The Chapel
The building was renamed the Cross Street Chapel and became a Unitarian meeting-house c.1761. It was wrecked by a Jacobite mob in 1715, rebuilt and destroyed during a World War II air 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 novelist Elizabeth 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."