His Place Community Church

His Place Community Church is a free church housed in the former Robertson Street Congregational Church. The building was designed in 1884-85 Henry Ward and remains a landmark presence in the Trinity Triangle area of central Hastings, with two striking Classical facades visible to the public: a tall, narrow one facing Robertson Street to the east and a large, six bay elevation facing Cambridge Road to the north.

The Congregational Church was a significant social and political force in Victorian Hastings, and its members spared little expense in building their new church, which replaced an earlier one built on the same site in 1855 and which they had outgrown. The fundraising for the new church was driven by Halley Stewart (1838-1937), an industrialist who was later to win national renown as a Liberal politician and philanthropist. His powers of persuasion were evidently formidable: it took just 18 months from deciding to demolish the old church to the dedication of the new one on 7 October 1885.

Victorian state of the art technology was used in the new church’s construction, including a steel-supported flying gallery to increase the size of the worship space on a very constricted urban site. Of the old church, only the east and west walls remain; the gallery widened the worship space on the south side and, on the north side, the new wall was built right up to the edge of the pavement, so that the resulting church was wider, but not longer than the original one.

The new church also included electric lighting (a UK first for a nonconformist church), patented ventilators for air circulation, and four stone staircases, one in each corner, to aid evacuation in the event of a fire. Today the interior retains many of its original features, such as the linoleum floor, elegantly curved pews and heating pipes, flock-papered dado rails, and plaster decoration by George Jackson & Sons. The large, horse-shoe galleried worship space seats up to 700 people. With its elegant wooden coffered ceiling and abundant Renaissance-style plaster decoration, it remains a strikingly beautiful venue with a superb acoustic for unamplified music.