By 1890 the Congregational community were looking to build a new church in one of the northern suburbs. Many Congregationalists had moved out of the town and were disinclined to travel all the way to St Mary Street to attend Albion Congregation Church. In 1892 they purchased Avenue House (not to be confused with the Toomer-designed Avenue House on the other side of the Avenue, see below), a large house on the north corner of The Avenue and Alma Road. They then purchased a moveable corrugated iron church building, which until then had been the St John's Free Church of England in Clifford Street. This building was re-erected in the garden of Avenue House and served as the church until the new building was built in 1897 on the site of Avenue House. The foundation stone of the new church, designed by architects Cubitt and Collinson in Perpendicular Tudor style, was laid in August 1897 and it was opened in December 1898.
It became Avenue United Reformed Church in 1972, when the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches became one, and is now Avenue St Andrew's URC, after St Andrew's URC (formerly St Andrew's Presbyterian Church closed in 1986.
The building is Grade II listed.
Avenue Congregational Church
An F. G. O. Stuart postcard of the church, c.1905
see also
Further reading:
A Short History of the Avenue Congregational Church, by Dora Oaten. (HS/j)
Southampton Occasional Notes(2nd Series), by ‘Townsman’, p39. (HS/h)
Buildings of England: Hampshire and the IOW, by Nikolaus Pevsner and David Lloyd, p574. (HS/j)
‘A Splendid Prospect’? Congregationalism in Edwardian Southampton 1901-1914 by Roger Ottewill, in Southampton Local History Forum Journal, no 15, Summer 2009, p38-64. (HS/h)
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