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This
palatial extravaganza of a building sits on the
main road from Stowmarket on the edge of the
large village of Bacton. It is a reminder that
villages and parishes are not the same things
that this church is in the parish of Cotton, not
Bacton, which starts on the other side of the
road. And so, despite the fact that Cotton
village is a mile or so off, this is Cotton
Methodist Church, not Bacton Methodist Church.
| The building suits the busy
road. It is urban in feel, and would not
look out of place in the suburbs -
indeed, it is very similar in style to
the Methodist People's Hall on Stoke
Street in Ipswich. The walls are banded
with red and white brick, and the windows
are in the transitional plate tracery
style of the late 13th century, when
Early English was becoming Decorated.
There are two main entrances to the south
of the building, which form the main
frontage. Probably due to the
car fumes, the foundation stone is now
rather indistinct, but the year 1877 can
still be made out, and this was when
William Pretty, owner of the main Ipswich
department store, declared the building
open. We have already met him on a
memorial stone at Alan
Road Methodist Church in
Ipswich.
The Methodists had an
earlier chapel, although it is not clear
to me if it was on the same site. It had
been built in 1814, and on the afternoon
of the Census of Religious Worship in
1851 it could claim a congregation of
260, compared with the 77 who attended
the Anglican parish church. This
adherence to non-conformism was a feature
of Suffolk life in the middle years of
the 19th Century. Methodism is, perhaps,
an enthusiasm which is now passing from
us, but with the lively and burgeoning
Baptist churches which you seem to find
in almost every larger Suffolk village,
it is to an extent also true today.
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Simon Knott, July 2009
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