Thich Nhat Hanh

In 1821 Mr William Dingley arrived in Sherborne from Launceston Cornwall.
He began worshipping in the Congregational Church in Long Street, but finding it too full and difficult to obtain a seat he decided to erect his own Wesleyan Chapel.

So in 1824 he purchased land and a large outhouse in Cheap Street and converted it into a chapel which seated 200 people.
He laid the foundations of the present  Methodist Church on the 23rd June 1841 and it opened in 1842 to a final cost of £3490.

The architecture is in the Gothic style, and remains much as originally built. Galleries were added inside in 1862 owing to an increase in congregation. At the West end a polygonal apse was added in 1884. Three shops on the Cheap Street frontage were demolished in 1851 and two new ones erected, leaving a pathway from the main street to the front entrance for the first time.

Near the entrance gates is a family-sized shoe scraper, complete with hand hold, now hidden by dense foliage, but if you peer behind the branches you can still find its twisted iron form as sturdy as ever.

The walls of the burial ground to the rear (Hospital Lane/Abbey Road access) have beautiful carved numbers to indicate grave spaces.

In 1986 the original Sunday School was sold to Sherborne School and is now known as the Powell Theatre. In an interesting theatrical link, the noted Victorian actor William Charles Macready and his family were among the congregation at the Methodist Church between 1850-1860, and he would no doubt approve of the theatrical endeavours of the Boys.

The Conduit at the bottom of Sherborne’s South Street.

The hexagonal 16th-century structure originally stood in the north cloisters of the abbey, where it was used for washing by the monks.

It was moved to this site after Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539