On your right, this frontage has had several lives. Rev. William Jenkins - born seventeen sixty-three, died eighteen forty-four - served as a Methodist circuit minister and, usefully, an architect. He put this chapel up in eighteen oh four and opened it on the twenty-second of July, eighteen oh five. It held eleven hundred worshippers, the biggest Methodist chapel Sheffield had seen. A week later, three hundred preachers crowded in for Sheffield’s first Wesleyan Conference. So, not exactly a timid debut.
Back then this stood in Cadman’s Fields, with corn all around and plenty of muttering that it lay too far outside town. Sheffield handled that objection by expanding until the chapel sat in the middle of the cutlery quarter. Two minutes from Leah’s Yard and close to Eye Witness Works, this was a chapel for little mesters - small independent metalworkers - whose hard week of grinding and forging bent around Sunday worship, literacy, and discipline.
The chapel reinforced that with schools: one on Rockingham Lane in eighteen twelve, still standing as Bishops Lodge apartments, then a bigger replacement on Rockingham Street in eighteen ninety-eight with three storeys, a lecture hall, and twenty-four classrooms. It cost four thousand pounds - a serious sum at the time.
Since the turn of the century, most people have known this place as Walkabout, an Australian-themed bar. Building its beer cellar disturbed one hundred and one burials from the old graveyard. The work has gone, but the facade and those chapel windows still teach.
Walk south down Devonshire Street toward the Cultural Industries Quarter; your next stop, Leah’s Yard, is only about two minutes away. If you want to come back later, check the current opening hours before you go.
