In 2012, the chapel became the first place of worship to be granted a
civil partnership licence when the law changed in England.[2] During the construction of
Manchester Metrolink's second city crossing in the
City Zone, 270 bodies from what used to be the chapel's graveyard had to be exhumed and reburied. The work took place from 2014–17.[3]
The Chapel
The building was renamed the Cross Street Chapel and became a Unitarian meeting-house c.1761.[4] It was wrecked by a
Jacobite mob in 1715, rebuilt and destroyed during a
World War IIair raid in December 1940. A new building was constructed in 1959 and the present structure dates from 1997. The Gaskell Room of the new building houses a collection of memorabilia of
novelistElizabeth Gaskell.
Notable ministry and congregation
Urban historian Harold L. Platt notes that in the Victorian period "The importance of membership in this Unitarian congregation cannot be overstated: as the fountainhead of Manchester Liberalism it exerted tremendous influence on the city and the nation for a generation."[5]
^Hotz, Mary Elizabeth (Summer 2000). ""Taught by death what life should be": Elizabeth Gaskell's representation of death in "North and South"". Studies in the Novel. 32 (2): 165–184.
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