Background
The Epworth Hall was originally a Wesleyan meeting house, and has been used by the church and local community groups for many years.
After the chapel itself was redeveloped in the mid 1990s, it became clear that the Epworth Hall was a problem. Low usage levels made it an unsustainable drain on the resources of the Methodist chapel.
A recent condition survey confirms what is clear even to the casual visitor: this Grade II listed building is dilapidated.
However, it is structurally sound.
The hall offers, on its upper floor, a large open space with an apse, used for theatre and music performances, and a number of rooms below suitable for meetings and storage.
Access is through a link from the chapel or through doors on both sides.
Frequent changes
Since it was built in 1798, the Epworth Hall's main purpose has changed several times - and its structure has changed to match.
Its history began in 1760, when a Methodist Society met in a purpose-built meeting house at St John's bridge, just in the the parish of Sithney, as Methodism was not yet accepted in the borough.
When John Wesley first visited the Helston area in 1746, his reputation as a zealous evangelist had preceded him, ruffling orthodox feathers to the extent that parish clergy closed their pulpits to him here as elsewhere, and people were openly hostile.
Reaching Helston, he decided it was safer to preach in the open air just beyond the parish boundary. He was greeted with showers of rotten vegetables and the threat of violence. He described Helston as a "town of rebels and persecutors".
He came back again and again, welcomed by more people each time, but did not enter the town until 1755.
Despite his growing acceptance, discretion ruled and his adherants built their first meeting house on the safer side of the parish boundary.
Twenty years later Wesley's "Methodist" movement - so called in recognition of his promotion of regularity in everyday life as well as in religious studies - had triumphed in most of England, and particularly in Cornwall. "How changed is this town," he remarked on a visit in 1773.
By 1796, the Wesleyan congregation had outgrown the St John's bridge building. A piece of land was bought just off Coinagehall Street, and plans were made to erect a larger meeting house.
The site faced the town jail and the Coinage Hall (an assay house for tin), both of which sat in the middle of the street until early in the next century. It was set behind a cluster of cottages and a smithy.
Much bigger
It took two years to raise £2,000 and build the new meeting house. Almost square in shape at 56ft x 52 ft, with galleries on three sides, it could seat 850 people.
The Baptist movement rapidly capitalised on the long-awaited acceptance of the Wesleyans. By 1804, the Baptist Society had put up a small building between the meeting hall and the smithy. This was bought by the Methodists in 1838.
The meeting house's most notable feature was added in 1865: the semicircular apse in the middle of the south wall. It, and the organ it was built to house, cost £400.
By then, the Helston meeting house had grown to be the mother chapel of a flourishing circuit: 800 members by 1821. It was the largest building in the town, accommodating its largest group of worshippers.
In 1879 the cottages - described in The Cornishman of the time as "an unsightly group of tumbledown houses which absolutely hid the Methodist chapel from view" - were demolished. The smithy had been pulled down years before.
Too small yet again
Congregations were still growing, and tastes were changing. By 1880, regulars considered "the old chapel is unattractive and uncomfortable." As well as Sunday worshippers, the building accommodated a flourishing Sunday school - as many as 1,000 children crowded into the gallery for an event in that year.
Before it gave Coinagehall Street its name, the Coinage Hall which once occupied the middle of the street between what is now Woolworth's and today's chapel, was a chapel of Our Lady. The street was called Lady Street, a name which still remembers that ancient place of worship, though it now refers to the small, steep street nearly opposite the Methodist church.
Today's chapel now stands in the centre bottom of the map below.
With a large piece of unused land and a large amount of public support - 600 of the town's 4,000 people were regular worshippers - the Methodists were perfectly placed for their next move: build a new chapel and turn the old one into a Sunday school, lecture space and concert rooms.
It took nine years overall. In May 1889, the first sermon was preached in the now familiar new chapel. It seated 970 people, and was erected at a cost of £5,000. The old building was renovated. Its galleries were extended until a whole new upper floor had been constructed. (You can see the six original gallery pillars half concealed in the partition walls below.) A central lecture room was created (now home to a nursery school), and "parlours, classrooms and vestries" were made on both sides under the old galleries. Our Picture Tour shows some of the accommodation.
Place of entertainment
Upstairs a large, flat-floored room was available for concerts, magic lantern shows and public entertainment, as well as religious events. Bazaars were housed there as fund-raisers.
A three-day, Grecian-themed bazaar was rigged up in March 1909 by a specialist contractor from Liverpool. The room "was arranged to represent a suburban district on the banks of the Ilussus river in ancient Greece," reported The Cornishman. Stalls themed as Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Olympia, Corinth, Arcadia and Argos (still a well-known trading name!), were manned by helpers "picturesquely attired in Grecian costumes."
The Epworth Hall is no stranger to things theatrical. This huge stage-set was built to house the Grecian Bazaar of 1909
This is where a water pump once stood to the west of today's chapel. It supplied the old chapel stables, which have been converted into the innermost of the cottages alongside. Another well existed between the old chapel and the smithy. Like this one, it is now capped, but it is still there, below a point just in front of the new chapel's pulpit.
Now called the Epworth Hall (after John Wesley's Lincolnshire birthplace), the old meeting house retained a mix of sacred and secular duties until 1988, when the ceiling of the new chapel was declared unsafe, and regular worship moved back to the old building.
In 1995, the chapel was reopened, transformed and modernised in much the same way as the Epworth Hall had been remodelled 100 years before. But costs rise. Raising £350,000 took 6½ years and building work took 10 months.
The Epworth Hall is a listed building which chapel finances cannot properly maintain, and which is under-used because of its condition.
In the flexible spirit which has characterised the building since its beginning, the Epworth Hall is poised for its next transformation.
Thanks to Mrs Betty Pascoe, Helston Methodist Church archivist, for information and documents.