Emmanuel United Reformed Church in Cambridge, England is located close to the centre of town, on Trumpington Street. A congregational church, it voted to join the new United Reformed Church in 1972.
The church has gone by different names over the years, first as the Hog Hill Independent Church and then the Emmanuel Congregational Chapel or Church.
The congregation was founded as the Cambridge 'Great Meeting' in 1687, at Hog Hill, the original building being there, on what is now the Old Music School in Downing Place. From 1691 the minister was Joseph Hussey; he is commemorated in the stained glass in the apse of the current building alongside John Greenwood, Henry Barrow, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton and Francis Holcroft. Hussey's congregation split in 1696, with some going to the meeting in Green Street, Cambridge, and again after he had left for London, in 1721, with a group founding the precursor of St Andrew's Street Baptist Church, Cambridge. The church was rebuilt on the same site in the later 18th century, opening as Emmanuel Congregational Chapel in 1790. The move to the new church on Trumpington Street, called the Emmanuel Congregational Church, came in 1874.[2] The old chapel was put to use from 1881 as the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women, for female science students in the University of Cambridge.
The current building is on Trumpington Street. It was built to a design by the architect James Cubitt in 1875.
Church. 1874 by James Cubitt. Modified Early English style. Stone, with slate roofs. West tower, nave, aisles and sanctuary. 4-stage tower with set-back buttresses to lower 3 stages. Arched west doorway with 2 orders of shafts rising to gable, in the tympanum of which is a quatrefoil. String courses between storeys. Second stage lit through plate-tracery rose window. Narrow ringing chamber with 3lancets to each facet. Tall octagonal belfry stage with square pinnacles developing out of buttresses and terminating in openwork tabernacle pinnacles. Cardinal sides with one louvred lancet each face: one order of shafts with stiff-leaf capitals and dog-tooth in the arches. Short octagonal spire with tabernacle lucarnes to each cardinal point. South side of tower with 2-stage polygonal stair turret entered through doorway under gablet and lit through cusped lancets beneath plain parapet. Aisles under sloping roofs pierced by lancets. Clerestory north and south consists of 2 groups of windows, each group of2 tall lancets flanked either side by one short lancet beneath an encircled quatrefoil. Short polygonal sanctuary with 3 pairs of lancets. Narthex added 1991 by Bland, Brown & Cole.
INTERIOR. All stone-faced. 2-bay nave. Wide moulded arcade arches on low double drum piers with stiff-leaf capitals. Principal clerestory windows have internal shafts. Tall chancel arch on engaged colonnettes with stiff-leaf capitals and corbels. Similar colonnettes support wall posts rising to double arch-braced roof with pierced spandrels. Chancel facets right and left of chancel arch with blind twin lancets. West gallery under tower with rosewood balustrade. Stained glass in sanctuary lancets of 1905 by Morris & Co., depicting Puritans with Cambridge connections.