Queen Street



Queen Street used to extend northwards fron Foregate Street through to the canal but was severed by the Tesco development. Nowadays, Queen Street lacks a coherent urban form, especially along its western side, a large portion of which is taken up by the rear servicing yard of the Boots store which is set behind a high brick wall. Development along this side of the street relates poorly to the scale of properties on the opposite side which has a stronger form, with properties (including a pleasant row of terraces), forming a more continuous frontage along the back of pavement. Queen's Place, (formerly part of Queen Street, now separated by the rebuilt Doric Screen of the chapel) is Georgian in character, with some attractive two and three storey townhouses finished with Flemish bonded brown brickwork.



William Armitage's appointment as pastor of the Commonhall Street Independent church in 1772 marked the beginnings of modern Congregationalism in Chester. Hemingway recalls how "Mr Armitage had not taken up his residence in Chester many days before a singularly awful Providence spread an universal gloom over the city and vicinity at the same time the circumstance was overruled for valuable purposes to many". The event of which Hemingway writes was the frightful gunpowder explosion of 5th November 1772 in Watergate Street. Armitage seems to argue that:


 * "Many debated in their minds whether the shew or the sermon would afford them the greatest entertainment. As I was just come to town and was entirely new to them several on this ground resolved to hear me and reserve their visit to the puppet room for a future evening. It was happy for them that they came to this resolution for that very night the place and about two hundred persons were blown into the air by the explosion of gunpowder.." - perhaps suggesting that those who chose his sermon about "burnt offerings" over the puppet show were somehow saved as a consequence.



In 1776, when it numbered c. 78 members, the congregation decided on new buildings in Queen Street. A brick chapel accommodating c. 900, a vestry, and a minister's house were built and services began on the new site in 1777. Congregationalism became fashionable in Chester between 1813 and 1818 with the ministry of John Reynolds, a former army officer and son of "Mad" King George III's physician (Henry Reynolds), and for a while the congregation included leading families and officers from the garrison. In 1838 the Queen Street chapel was enlarged and adorned with a neo-Grecian facade of white stone with Doric columns in antis. The cost, with that of ancillary buildings, encumbered the church with debt for 20 years. The Queen Street chapel was exceptionally successful under Richard Knill (1848–57) and survived the troubled pastorate of P. C. Barker (1865–9), who alienated many of the congregation before he eventually became an Anglican priest. In 1851 the Congregationalists ranked third in numbers in Chester after the Anglicans and Wesleyans. The church burned down in 1963, and in 1964 the congregation was dissolved. The remains of the old building were largely demolished in 1978, except for the facade, retained as part of a Tesco supermarket, and a Doric screen from the lecture hall, resited at the northern end of a truncated Queen Street.