Baptist Church

Baptist Church, dated 1842, is located on Holyrood Street in Chard. It features a facade made of Ham Hill stone ashlar, with a rubblestone and brick rear, and a slate roof. The church has a single room plan and later 19th-century school rooms at the back. Designed in the Greek Revival style, it is two storeys high with a symmetrical one-window range. The building has a substantial plinth and four rounded steps leading up to an eight-panel double door, which is set in a moulded architrave beneath a cornice supported by consoles. Above the door is a large semicircular-arched window with cast-iron glazing bars, framed by Doric pilasters and a small pediment with antefixae. This window is flanked by two pairs of full-height Doric pilasters that support a cornice and pediment, which nearly spans the facade and features the carved date MDCCCXLII. The ground floor displays banded rustication between the plinth and a platband above the door.

Inside, the east end has a round-arched recess over a semicircular-arched cast-iron window, adorned with late 19th-century red and blue glass borders, above a substantial pulpit raised on two octagonal columns that fan out to support a curved-fronted platform. The original 1842 stairs have stick balusters and a mahogany rail, while the front balusters are of late 19th-century cast-iron bamboo design. There are four-panel doors set in reeded architraves on each side of the pulpit. The east end features an incised key pattern on the panelling. A gallery surrounds the other three sides, supported by cast-iron pillars, and has cast-iron windows above the original pews; the windows below were replaced in 1988. This church is recognized as a very fine and complete example of its type.