Mill Hill Chapel

Mill Hill Chapel is a Unitarian church in Leeds, in the north of England. It is a member of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella organisation for British Unitarians. The building, which stands in the centre of the city on Leeds City Square, was granted Grade II* listed status in 1963.

As early as 1674, only a dozen years after the Great Ejection, the Dissenters in Leeds had built a chapel on the main town square. One of the founders was the father of the historian Ralph Thoresby.

Associated with the chapel were prominent merchants, industrialists, and politicians such as the Lupton family. The chapel became known punningly as "the mayors' nest", as so many mayors and later lord mayors belonged to it. There are memorials to, for example, Francis Garbutt (1847) and John Darnton Luccock (1864).

The Kitson family were also deeply involved in the chapel. William Morris designed a window to Ann Kitson, who died in 1865. Her son James Kitson, 1st Baron Airedale, paid for the extension of the vestry in 1897. After James's death, Archibald Keightley Nicholson created a window in his name, representing the continuation of Christianity.

The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society drew many of its supporters from the chapel. "There was a careful consciousness of middle-class identity and independence...which combined easily with the utilitarian and scientific interests" of the Mill Hill congregation.

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