BRIDGETON CHURCH (PENTECOSTAL)
231, Dalmarnock Road, Bridgeton

This building in Dalmarnock Road by J. C. MCKellar with an Art Nouveau detailed bell turret was originally built for an Evangelical Union congregation that started in 1858 in Hutchesontown.  It was a congregation that was to undertake not a few moves during its existence, before finally settling in the Dalmarnock area.

For ten years after its establishment the congregation met in the Mechanics Hall in Canning Street and when it joined the Evangelical Union in 1862 it was known as the Calton E.U. Church.  In 1869, the congregation built their own chapel in West Street, Calton (now Kerr Street).  It remained there until it was discovered thirty years later that the building had become unsafe.  The site was sold to the North British Railway Company and a new location sought.  Until their new church was built in Dalmarnock Road in 1901-02 the congregation met first in the Albert Halls, Main Street and then the Bridgeton Working Men's Club in Landressy Street.

The new building was supposedly built to withstand the effects of the railway which still runs underneath this stretch of Dalmarnock Road from Bridgeton to Dalmarnock stations, and for a century it has done so.  Previous experience was no doubt the source of this precaution, as well as a determination finally to secure a more permanent haven.

The congregation had united with the Congregational Union in 1896 and it grew until it became the largest in the whole of the Union with over 1100 members.  However, with the depopulation and redevelopment of area in the 1960s and 1970s, the church declined greatly in membership.  It was decided that the three local congregations were not independently viable and so in 1969 Bethany, the Hood Memorial and Dalmarnock Road amalgamated to form Bridgeton Congregational Church.  The Dalmarnock buildings continued in use, while the others were eventually demolished.

With the continuing depletion in local population, the new church still could not survive.  There followed a period in which the structure decayed so much that doubt arose as to whether it could survive the widespread demolition taking place around it, and which had left it as one of few buildings left standing in the whole of Bridgeton and Dalmarnock.  The church finally closed its doors in 1980, leaving the building to a very uncertain fate.

As it was of some architectural significance, being a B-Listed building, there was a reluctance on the part of the authorities to see the building taken down.  After negotiations between himself and the Scottish Development Agency (SDA), it was finally taken over in the same year by Pastor Hayton of Zion Hall.  This came about through the enforced removal of the pastor and his church from Calton for the same reason of redevelopment.

Zion Hall was an autonomous congregation, established c.1952 in the Church of Scotland's Lodging House Mission as Hall Church, a member of the Assembles of God, and part of the wider Pentecostal Church.  It relocated to the upper storey of a small building at the junction of Green Street and London Road from 1957 as Zion Hall.  This building had previously been a pawnbrokers.

In 1978, the advancing bulldozers in the Calton required that a new home be found and the Dalmarnock church was eventually settled upon, becoming Bridgeton Free Evangelical Church, then simply Bridgeton Church.  The compensation money obtained from the enforced removal from Zion Hall was used for the purchase and was supplemented by a grant from the SDA.  Extensive renovations were undertaken, with the church being restored in a traditional style.  At the first Communion service, there was a mere 8 celebrants, but since then the church has gone from strength to strength as the population has returned to fill the many new homes built in the area.

Pastor Hayton is the second of that name to officiate in the church.  The first Rev Hayton served from 1905-25 in the Congregational church, leading to its being nicknamed “Hayton's Church.”

Dalmarnock Congregational Church, Centenary Brochure, Glasgow, October, 1958.

© 2005 Gordon Adams

GALLERY:

In 1974, the church was still of the Congregational denomination.  This photograph was taken at a time when Dalmarnock Road was still lined with tenements on both sides from Bridgeton Cross to Dalmarnock Bridge.