Fonds GB 0210 CITYRD - CMA: Records of City Road Chapel, Chester

City Road Presbyterian Church, Chester, is descended from one of the chapels of the Rev. Philip Oliver's Calvinistic Methodist Connection.

This Cheshire Methodist connection was founded by the Rev. Philip Oliver (1764-1800), an evangelical Anglican minister, in an out-building in his home village of Broughton. He was a friend of the Rev. Thomas Charles of Bala, and he and other Welsh Calvinistic Methodist ministers who could preach in English assisted in the work. The connection was put on a formal footing shortly before Philip Oliver's death, when Thomas Charles and two others were given complete oversight and management. Philip Oliver's will gave his trustees the power to transfer the Broughton cause to a more convenient centre. This course was adopted in 1813, when the trustees bought the Octagon Chapel, Foregate Street, Chester, which had been vacated by the Wesleyans in 1811, and removed the cause from Broughton to Chester.

Until 1813 the connection's ministers and lay preachers continued to be supplied by the Welsh Methodists, with some from the Church of England and Lady Huntingdon's Connection, but for the next forty years they appointed their own ministers. In 1853 the connection and its six chapels, comprising Octagon (Chester), Ebenezer (Waverton, closed 1982), Tarvin (closed and sold pre-1892), Delamere (closed 1971), Saighton and Cotebrook, were received into the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connection.

In 1864 the Octagon Chapel was conveyed to the London & North Western Railway Company and demolished, being in the line of construction of the new City Road between Foregate Street and the railway station. The replacement chapel, the City Road Chapel, was somewhat smaller than the old Octagon. New school rooms were built in 1880, and branch causes were opened at Belgrave Farm on the Wrexham Road in 1888, and at Saltney Ferry in 1890. The latter cause became a distinct church in 1893. The school room in City Road was sold in 1978. The City Road Presbyterian Church is still in being (January 2002).