Tabernacle Chapel including forecourt Railings

The Tabernacle Chapel, built in 1873, is a significant example of late 19th-century nonconformist architecture, demonstrating group value through its aesthetic and historical importance. The chapel’s impressive entrance facade is centred on a monumental three-bay Corinthian arcade, topped by a pediment featuring a plate-traceried roundel and a plaque bearing the name ‘Tabernacle’. Flanking this central feature are narrower, single-window wings. The detailing, characteristic of the architect Humphreys’ style, incorporates varied round-arched elements. The arcade itself is composed of moulded arches supported by massive attached columns, with ashlar patterned roundels in the spandrels. The recessed facade is distinguished by extensive horizontal ashlar banding. A central arched doorway, featuring column shafts and recessed cusping on the head, leads to a panelled door. The bays contain a pair of narrow lights with shouldered lintels at ground floor level, and a further row of two pairs of narrow arched lights above, all detailed with bands at sill and arch levels. The main windows are paired, arched, and framed in ashlar, with rubble stone panels beneath the sills. These windows feature “Florentine” tracery of two arched lights and a roundel, set within marginal glazing bars. The narrow bays on either side of the centrepiece echo this style with ground floor arched doorways and arched windows above, complete with Florentine tracery, marginal glazing bars, and flush banding. A top parapet incorporates pierced, shouldered-lintelled openings, and end pedestals are topped with neo-Grec anthemion blocks. The side elevations, five windows wide, present a giant arcade with ashlar capitals, arranged in a two-storey configuration of arch windows over paired, narrow arched windows. The rear of the chapel is gabled, with a two-storey, two-window projection.

The forecourt is enclosed by iron railings fixed upon a coped rubble wall, which extends westwards in front of the adjacent Sunday School building. The railings are composed of spearhead rails with twisted uprights. Two pairs of iron gates, incorporating dog-bars, are set between blue lias ashlar gatepiers.

The interior of the chapel is remarkably unaltered. It is dominated by a wide, elliptical-arched, panelled ceiling, corniced with corbel blocks to the ribs. A four-sided gallery is supported by four by three cast-iron columns, with a coved cornice under the gallery front, featuring walnut veneer panels and decorative pierced cast-iron work. This gallery front drops behind the pulpit. The “set fawr,” a half-elliptical enclosure, is enclosed by a pierced cast iron rail, and the pulpit has stairs on each side, with twisted balusters and a Gothic round-arched, panelled front. A gallery was likely inserted behind the pulpit around 1901, housing the organ. The organ recess is flanked by large Corinthian pilasters and features an elliptical panelled arch. Patterned glass from around 1900 can be found on either side of the organ. The organ itself was built by W G Vowles of Bristol. Open-well stairs are situated in each of the four angles of the interior, providing access to the galleries.