Plaque: Huguenot fan makers
Fann Street
Huguenot fan makers settled here and the Worshipful Company of Fanmakers met in their Common Hall nearby and adopted their new constitution in the year 1710.
This plaque may correctly show where fan makers settled but their Hall was some distance away - see the blue plaque.
Site: Welsh church foundation stone + fan makers (2 memorials)
EC1, Fann Street, 70, Jewin Welsh Church
The fan makers' plaque is on the west face of the building, to the left of our photograph. The more central plaque gives the times of church services. Below that, near the ground and behind the bollards, is the foundation plaque.
This building is the Mother Church of the Welsh Presbyterian Church in London, whose history is:
c.1774, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist congregation held services in Cock Lane, Smithfield. By 1785 they had moved to Wilderness Row, near the junction of what is today St John Street and Clerkenwell Road. In 1822-3 they moved to Jewin Crescent, a street now lost under the Barbican but maps at Londonist make it clear where this was. Wales online has a splendid photo of the congregation gathered outside this chapel in 1876, presumably, a farewell gathering.
1878-9 a new chapel was built by Charles Bell in nearby Fann Street and the congregation moved there but retained the Jewin name.
The chapel was destroyed in WW2 air raids in September 1940. Capel Jewin has a painting, uncaptioned, which we think is probably the chapel ruin.
Replaced by current building in 1956-61, designed by Caroe and Partners in a Swedish-inspired form of modern architecture sometimes called the New Humanism.
