Above Bar Church

Above Bar Church
Location	Above Bar Church 69 Above Bar Street Southampton SO14 7FE
Denomination	Independent (affiliated to Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches)
Website	www.abovebarchurch.org.uk
History
Founded	1876
Founder(s)	Henry Samuel Earl
Architecture
Architect(s)	Robert Potter of Brandt Potter Associates
Style	Modernist
Years built	1981
Clergy
Minister(s)	John Risbridger, Paul Webber

Above Bar Church is an evangelical church in Southampton, affiliated to the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches. The building is on the corner of Above Bar Street and Ogle Road in Southampton City Centre, with shops on the ground level and the auditorium and other rooms above them.

This history is based on Past and Present, a booklet published by the church for the opening of a new building in 1981.

Above Bar Church was established in 1876 by Henry Samuel Earl, a missionary with the Foreign Christian Missionary Society of the Disciples of Christ (then synonymous with the Churches of Christ; the two became separate in 1906). Earl started preaching in the Philharmonic Rooms on Above Bar Street (on the site of what later became the Odeon cinema and is now shops) in February 1876, with a local choir to lead the singing and the widow of a Congregational minister playing the organ. More than seven hundred people came to the first service, and even more the following week despite a snowstorm. On the third Sunday, the hall was full. The majority of these people were members of other churches, of course, but a regular congregation began to develop. Henry Earl rented a small Baptist church that was being used as a warehouse and had it repaired and furnished to seat more than 300 people. As well as filling this building to capacity on Sunday mornings, Earl was soon also running week-night services and had started a Sunday School. A church was formally established in August 1876 with an initial membership of 33.

A clothing manufacturer from the north of England, Timothy Coop, donated £3,000 to Earl towards the cost of buying land and constructing a permanent building. Between the Philharmonic Hall and Ogle Road was a 60-foot-wide (18 m) plot of land, which Earl bought for £1000. He also bought three more lots in Ogle Road for £300. One of these was a skating rink (both ice skating and roller skating were popular in the late 1870s) and the other two were part of the grounds of a large mansion, Ogle Hall. Volunteers from the church dismantled the skating rink and used the bricks and windows for the new church building, which opened in 1880. On 17 August 1886, a Trust Deed was signed, passing the ownership of the site and building to the trustees of ‘Church of Christ, Above Bar’.

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