Vernon
Street Mission Room
One of the
few remaining buildings on the once-busy shopping and residential road
that was
Vernon Street: the Mission Room. Beyond the
(Methodist? – see update below) Mission Room is the one-time
Silver Star
public house which has opened and closed over the years, most recently
being a Polish bar and in 2012 The Three Buccaneers. In the photograph,
behind that is the R&W
Paul Ltd silo to the left and near
the centre the top stories of The
Mill.
'VERNON
ST.
ERECTED
MISSION ROOM
A.D.1870'
Large and small chisel capitals; very nice
use of the strong decender on the numeral '7'.
The Mission
Room is, in 2012, the Shiloh Pentecostal Church. Note the lion's heads
punctuating the gutter.
[UPDATE 10.2.2020: 'Hi I am
wondering if the history of the Vernon Street Mission Room is a little
more complex than the description “Methodist Mission Room” suggests.
There are numerous newspaper articles linking the room to the Parish of
St. Peter. The Ipswich Journal
of 8 November 1881 contains a census of church attendance and Vernon
Mission Room is listed with the Anglican churches. Did the Mission Room
transfer to Methodists at some later date? It was certainly build as a
Mission Room for the parish of St Peter.
The ancient parish (of St Peter) extends along the banks of the Orwell
in both directions. I think it might loosely be described as the flood
plain before modern river management and building.
The parish of St Peter extended to include all those roads from Stoke
Street on the east to include Bell Lane,
Austin Street, Great Whip
Street, New Cut, Tyler Street, Purplett
Street and Vernon Street etc.
Presumably St Peter’s Church wanted
to respond to the new building on
the south side of the river but still within their parish, by building
the mission room. The St Peter’s parish boundary comes within a
few meters of (St Mary At) Stoke
church.
I found a 1950 OS map which shows the Mission Hall marked as ‘Elim
Church’. It’s used now by Shiloh Pentecostal Fellowship who date their
foundation in Ipswich to the 1960s. Marcus Bateman. Very interesting, thanks, Marcus.]
Notes
Shiloh, Shilo, or Silo is
mainly known as the name of the biblical city which preceded Jerusalem
as the central worship site of the early Israelites.
The name 'Elim' was taken from
the account in the Book of Exodus, chapter 15, verse 27, where the
Israelites, leaving the bondage of Egypt under the leadership of Moses,
found an oasis called Elim: "Then they came to Elim, where there were
twelve wells of water and seventy palm trees; so they camped there by
the waters." This represented a place of refreshing and it was thought
appropriate for a revival movement at that time.
Pentecostalism or Classical
Pentecostalism is a Protestant Christian movement that emphasises
direct personal experience of God through baptism with the Holy Spirit.
The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, the Greek name for the
Jewish Feast of Weeks. For Christians this event commemorates the
descent of the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus Christ, as
described in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
See our Felaw Street page for
the street nameplates in this vicinity.
It's only a few hundred yards from the Mission Room to The Old Bell and the Trinity
House buoy (towards the town) and Christ's Hospital Buildings,
Uncle
Tom's Cabin, the Bake Office and C.J. Hawes shop (towards Wherstead).
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