Penny's Hospital Chapel

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Mon, 09/06/2025 - 00:00

Penny’s Hospital in Lancaster is an institution past which I walked to school each day when I was growing up. The word 'hospital' refers to hospitality rather than healthcare, and it offered to fourteen old men or widows free accommodation and clothing in return for clean living, if they were ‘neat and tidy in dress’ and were at home by 10 o’clock each night. The older I become, the more appealing this sounds.

William Penny was thrice mayor of Lancaster and established his alms-houses by 1720, the next door Assembly Rooms being opened in 1759 to raise additional funds for the charity. Like many eighteenth-century benevolent institutions, there was an attached chapel which I found to be pleasant enough, though small. According to the Lancashire Past website:

In 1929 King Street, being a major thoroughfare in Lancaster, was widened. This meant that two of the houses closest to the street had to be demolished. In order to keep accommodation capacity the same, the chapel was shortened and two new houses were built next to it. The chapel was refurbished at this time, and the large screen wall that separates the courtyard from the road was rebuilt in its present position.

Above the Hospital entrance is inscribed:

“In the year 1720 these houses were founded and endowed out of generosity of William Penny, Gent. lately an Alderman of Lancaster, who ordered that the unrighteous should keep away from here”.

This ends on a rather foreboding note, but the text above the chapel seem a little more optimistic:

“Forget not the congregation of the poor”,

while within, in a stained glass window, we read:

Take ye heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is Mark 13.33

Although the last two texts are fitting for any Christian congregation, the one excluding the unrighteous is not. Although keeping out lewd and godless persons from his benevolent institution might have been advisable or desirable practice, the unrighteous are not only welcome to church, but we are positively called to bring them. The true gospel will change and convert us, of course, but none of us are born righteous enough to meet God on our own terms. For having come to Him in our filthy rags, we are then clothed in neat and tidy linen, all clean and smart; arriving penniless and impoverished, He makes us co-heirs to His vast fortune. Let the unrighteous come, but may they not stay that way.