Headington Baptist Church, Old High Street
Early in the nineteenth century, Oxford’s New Road Baptist Chapel started one of its first "mission stations" for dissenters in Old Headington, and in 1836 opened Headington’s first purpose-built Baptist chapel, now known as Croft Hall. By the end of the century, however, the chapel in the Croft was evidently no longer big enough, and in 1901 the Baptists built a new chapel in Old High Street.
The tumbledown cottage to the south of the new chapel was declared unsafe and demolished in November 1916, and two years later the vacant plot was bought by the Baptist Chapel for £90. As most of the male members of the congregation were still away at war, women and children helped to clear the site for growing vegetables, as the picture below shows. The site was to remain a vegetable plot for sixteen years.
The postcard below shows the interior of the church in 1927.
In 1934 the church was extended for the first time (at
a cost of £500) over part of the vegetable plot.
The rest of the plot was turned into a garden, as the picture
below (taken in 1948) shows.
In 1971 the garden was lost when the church was extended again, and the new enlarged church was used for another 23 years until 2004 (below)
In 2003 planning permission was granted to build a very different church on the same site. The pictures below show (1) the old 1901 church and its accretions being demolished in August 2004 and (2) the new church on its first day in service on Sunday 5 November 2006.
The second, third, and fourth pictures on this page are reproduced
with kind permission of Headington Baptist Church