The Congregational Church and St Elizabeth of Portugal pictured on an old postcard in 1913

You can now read, on this website,  articles by Peter Flower on the church’s history of the Congregational Chapel in The Vineyard (now the Vineyard Life Church):

• Thomas Wilson, the 19th-century businessman and philanthropist, whose generosity led to the building of the church
• The story of the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Society that, in providing services in the late 1890s that were “bright, brief and brotherly” was very successful in meeting its aim of  “bringing in “those who were not connected with any place of worship”
• A “preacher with red hair” who addressed the Congregational Church in 1876 and who Peter believes may have been the artist Vincent van Gogh
• The Revd Henry Beresford Martin (1808-1874), the Victorian church’s remarkable young minister
• the church’s First World War memorial and the stories of those recorded on it
• the role of women in leadership at the Vineyard Church
• The Victorian burial plot of the Vineyard Chapel – from graveyard to garden