The Meeting Today
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About 18 adults and five children attend Meeting for Worship on Sundays.
We welcome visitors whom we hope will be able to stay to join us for coffee
after Meeting for Worship.
Frenchay
Quaker Meeting has a programme of social events as well as its spiritual
life, based upon the meeting for worship each Sunday.
The
meeting house is used by many local groups; Frenchay Horticultural
Society, Frenchay Model Railway Club, a circle dance group and a tai chi
class. Rooms are let on a weekly basis to two Alcoholics Anonymous
groups and for counselling sessions. The Frenchay Tuckett Society, a
local history group, meets regularly and the Avon Local History and
Archaeology group has recently moved out of
Bristol
to hold committee meetings in the meeting house. South
Gloucestershire Council’s Walking to Health project uses the building
as a base for its walks in the area. The meeting is always pleased to
let its facilities which were recently used as a venue for a golden
wedding celebration and by a local group which held a strawberry tea to
thank its volunteers. The meeting runs a thriving recycling project.
The
venue, with its unique atmosphere, is ideal for meetings, conferences
and seminars. The building
has level access to the ground floor meeting room, garden and toilets
and there is a stairlift to the first floor meeting room and kitchen.
A Resident Friend/Warden lives on site and is the first point of
contact.
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Brief History
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Friends (Quakers) have worshipped in the area since the middle of the
seventeenth century, first meeting in private houses. In 1673, a Meeting
House at Frenchay was completed near the site of the present one. A caretaker's
cottage was added at the back of the Meeting House in the mid18th century.
Hannah Rogers, who lived in Home Farm next door, now the
site of Frenchay Lodge Cottage, gave a portion of her land for a burial
ground to be added to the Meeting House. The oldest grave stone is that
of Mary Gaynor, 1756.
The current
meeting house is a listed building dated 1809. Since then Quaker
meetings for worship have been held in the building which stands facing
Frenchay Common. The new building consisted of the present room where Meeting
for Worship is held, and the space upstairs, now the kitchen area. A small
corridor gave access to the road and the burial ground. Five years later,
responding to a request from the women of the Meeting, an extension was
built to the front, providing a meeting room above and stabling below,
and the corridor was extended. The interior wood panelling and screen is
of Archangel red pine imported from the Baltic through the City Docks.
A notable local Quaker in the eighteenth century was Anthony
Purver, schoolmaster and Clerk to the Meeting. He was friendly with John
Wesley and undertook the formidable task of translating the Bible; a copy
of this translation can be seen in the glass case in the library. Quaker
merchants who lived in the area included Joseph Storrs Fry. Another
noted Frenchay Quaker family was the Tucketts, who gave the field opposite
the Meeting House, in a corner of which the Village Hall now stands, for
the people of Frenchay.
In 1996/97, the exterior of the Meeting House was extensively
refurbished at which time layers of paint were removed and the walls treated
with lime wash similar to the original.
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