page_title: Swallow Street
section_title: Churches
hierarchical_section_title: Swallow Street / Properties / Churches
caption_attribution_description: English: Front elevation of 1801 plans for a Scotch Church to be built on Swallow Street, London.
context_page_description: Swallow Street is a small street in the West End of London, running north from Piccadilly. It is about 341 feet long.
context_section_description: Richard Baxter, a Puritan church leader, preached from rooms hired in Swallow Street between April and November 1676. Thomas Tenison, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, is recorded to have established a chapel of ease in Swallow Street in the late 17th century, during the 1680-1691 period of his incumbency of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and perhaps in response to the huge rise in the population of the parish, from 19,000 in 1660 to 69,000 in 1685. Thomas Frognall Dibdin for a time held a preachership at the chapel.
  A Huguenot chapel, L'Eglise de Piccadilly, and known as the French Chapel was opened on Swallow Street in 1694 by a congregation removing from York Street. It continued until circa 1709, when the chapel lease was taken by a Scottish Presbyterian congregation which had previously met at Glasshouse Street. The church, led by James Anderson, was known as the Scotch Church, and during Anderson's life - perhaps in 1734 - a new meeting-house was built on Swallow Street. The merchant and philanthropist Alexander Birnie was an elder.
  The Presbyterian built a new church on Swallow Street in the 1801-1804 period. The missionary Robert Morrison was ordained at the Scotch Church in 1807. The church failed in the 1840s, and the lease was taken by Colonel Somers Lewis of the 4th Middlesex Rifle Volunteer, who converted the church into a drill hall.
  The lease was bought in 1884 by Charles Voysey, a Church of England cleric who had been deprived of his living for the unorthodoxy of his popular printed sermons. In 1885 he created a Theistic Church, which he maintained until his death in 1912, after which it split into two sects, one retaining the original name, the other the "Free Religious Movement". The building's lease was ended in 1915 and the church building demolished in the same year. Olive Willis attended and George May, 1st Baron May was married there.
caption: Front elevation of 1801 plans for a new Swallow Street Scotch Church building
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