Clyde Binfield, at the launch of 'A Brixton Chapel' on 23rd February 2024

Once Dr Argent gets going there is no stopping the man. Writer’s block has yet to bar his way. Forget the sermons and addresses - those are a minister’s occupational hazard and stock-in-trade. Focus instead on the articles and the books, a stream precipitated by his thesis on London Parish Churches in the 1640s, that best of decades on which to cut your academic teeth, and then edging towards the present day. For proof, I would adduce his tercentenary history of Dr Williams’s Library and Trust (2021), his Transformation of Congregationalism 1900-2000 (2013), his biography of Elsie Chamberlain, that minister of national note whose life encapsulated that transformation, and a volume of quite a different sort which brings us closer to home and to today, The Angels’ Voice. That sounds as if it has something to do with north London, Islington no doubt, except that the clue lies in the apostrophe for it is in fact very much a south-of-the-river compilation, Dr Argent’s edition of A Magazine for Young Men in Brixton, London 1910-1913, handsomely published for the London Record Society in the same year as he first lectured on the history of Dr Williams’s: 2016.

How long ago 2016 seems … Remain down the drain (only just, and by the skin of its teeth), control about to be taken back, pie ready to swoop down from the sky … and here we are in 2024, eight years on, an election year, when all might at last change - or at least remain much the same but with a whiff at least of competence and a promise of something better.

It is to such hopes as that, held perennially, that this church stands witness. In appearance Trinity is the quintessential Congregational Chapel, not indeed in the grand London manner, for this was never a pulpiteer’s paradise, but as something more genuinely representative. The history of such a place, however many or few will actually read it, is bound to be important because it must explore the spirituality, the mentality, the activity of individual men, women, and children congregating together, bound in fellowship, witnessing to an alternative vision of what is nationally - and eternally - vital. It sheds light on society, south London light in this instance. Yet think now how many people walk past this interesting and rather attractive building without having a clue as to what it represents. It needs a written history. Such histories are necessarily the epitome of parish-pumpism, they are also its justification. This Chapel History fits the bill.

There is more to it than that. Its author has known this chapel since boyhood or at least adolescence. He has been member and officeholder here … and minister. Alan and I have long quibbled over that word - he is a “pastor” man and I am a “minister” man. Alan’s ministry here, his pastorate, has been of nineteenth-century Congregational magnitude. One consequence of this is that Alan’s history of his church becomes increasingly autobiographical - and that, for me, is its particular interest. There is one other dimension that interests me: the nature of the church shaped by his ministry.

Here I put on my United Reformed hat. Trinity retained its stated Congregationalism after 1972, that inevitably divisive date. I do not think that the sort of fellowship that evolved here after 1972 would have fitted at all easily into the URC of the 1970s or 1980s, or, indeed, have survived the transition. I like to think it might be different now … Anyway, buy this book, read this book, and see if you agree with anything that I have just said.