The Memorial Church of the Pilgrim Fathers (Buckenham Square, 1864)

The Memorial Church of the Pilgrim Fathers was one home of the Congregationalists in London, and stood in Buckenham Square, New Kent Road in Southwark, from the 1860s to 1941. After the mid-19^th century growth of interest in the Mayflower, the Congregationalists - following their American brethren - were one of the first groups in Britain to catch onto the power of the story. That century was a bloom period for these religious nonconformists; as the cities and suburbs expanded, and the Victorian doctrine of ‘self-help’ was increasingly espoused, there was a ready market for their religiously informed social and political radicalism.

Southwark, for its part, could trace an influential dissenting tradition all the way back into the late 16^th century. In the 1580s and 1590s, important Separatists like Henry Barrowe and John Greenwood were imprisoned in ‘the Clink’ prison in the neighbourhood and went on to set up the Southwark Independent Church in 1892. John Penry – another Separatist – was hung for sedition in the neighbourhood in 1893. In 1616, Henry Jacob, who had been a member of the Established Church, drew on the beliefs of John Robinson – the Pilgrim Father’s pastor – to form a church in the neighbourhood. In 1620 and over the next few decades, many of these dissenters left for the Plymouth colony.

In 1846, the Leeds-born Congregationalist minister John Waddington had taken over ministering the church – at that time in an ‘obscure and secluded chapel’ in Union Street. Waddington was not just a minister but a historian too. He had a particular interest, naturally, in the history of nonconformity, and the local area too. By the late 1840s he was researching and publishing books on key figures like Penry and Robinson, and their connection to Southwark. It was around this time, under Waddington’s influence, that the Union Street Chapel began calling itself ‘the Church of the Pilgrim Fathers’. By 1851, with their lease running out and their congregation growing, the church needed a new home. A site in Buckenham Square was chosen, and plans drawn up for a lecture-hall, school-rooms and impressive church costing about £3,500. With wider interest in the Mayflower growing, the new name for the church was to be ‘The Memorial Church of the Pilgrim Fathers’ – a fitting reminder for ‘the coming generations’, as member and Chamberlain of London Benjamin Scott put it

"of the martyrdom, sufferings, and privations of those who were the fathers of restored freedom of conscience and free worship in the old world, and who became the founders of an empire of free worshippers in the new."

Money-raising campaigns began in earnest across Britain and New England too – with Waddington undertaking much of the heavy lifting himself, delivering talks on the history of the Pilgrim Fathers and even giving a dedication prayer at the inauguration of a campaign for a monument in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1859. Much goodwill – and money too – came via this international network of Congregationalists. The lecture hall was completed in the late 1850s, before the church was finally finished in 1864 – complete with a memorial tablet to the Fathers.

Waddington retired in 1871, and died in 1880. Over the next few decades, however, the church retained its link to the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers. In 1920, during the 300^th anniversary of the voyage, special services – with borough councillors in full ‘civic state’ – took place in the church, and other Mayflower memorial ceremonies were held throughout the interwar decades. Unfortunately, as The Sphere put it in 1941, the ‘Mayflower Church’ was ‘destroyed by Nazis’. ‘Aptly enough’, however, ‘their descendants in the USA’ were ‘busy making arms to destroy the Nazi evil’.

A memorial plaque was put up not longer after:

"Men and women of Southwark sailed in the Mayflower from the Thames in 1620

This plaque has been erected by the trustees of the Pilgrim Fathers Memorial Church which existed near this site until 1940"

In the mid-1950s, a new ‘memorial church’ was rebuilt on Great Dover Street.

Benjamin Scott, Lays of the Pilgrim Fathers compiled in aid of the fund for completing the Memorial Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, in Southwark (London, 1861).

‘Memorial Church of the Pilgrim Fathers’, Clerkenwell News (30 May 1864), 3.

‘The Pilgrim fathers and religious liberty’, Morning Advertiser (16th December 1859), 6.

‘Mayflower Church destroyed by Nazis’, The Sphere (5th April 1941), 32.

‘Remarkable story of a relic of the Mayflower’, Westminster Gazette (6th September 1920), 5.

John Waddington, ‘The Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, Southwark’ in The Works of John Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers (1851).