73 years from start to boom to finish. A Runnymede church's short history
I always look for anomalies when researching local history. Why doesn’t a building or a lack of a building fit into the neighbourhood? In the case of the row houses on St John’s between Willard and Priscilla, you would wonder why these were built so differently and clearly at a later date than the other homes nearby, mostly in the 1930s. I remember that this was a sparsely attended church in the 1990s. A scattering of cars on a Sunday morning and a head poking out the side door from time to time to check the weather. The St John’s Street Baptist Church had started off full of promise in 1905. It intrigued me as some of my long-deceased relatives had been Baptists, and the St John’s facility at one point had 600 children registered in Sunday School. The first Baptist effort in Runnymede happened in 1904. A group of men attending Dovercourt Baptist undertook to raise funds in order to start a West End church. Edgar Watson, Lionel Watson, George Yeo, William Durant, Percy Roberts,...
