Providence Chapel

Providence Chapel is a former Nonconformist place of worship in the village of Charlwood in the English county of Surrey. Founded in 1816 on the outskirts of the ancient village, it was associated with Independent Calvinists and Strict Baptists throughout nearly two centuries of religious use. The "startling" wooden building—remarkably un-English with its simple veranda-fronted style—had seen several years of service as an officers' mess at a nearby barracks. The chapel was put up for sale in 2012. English Heritage has listed it at Grade II* for its architectural and historical importance. It was also on that body's Heritage at Risk Register because of its poor structural condition, but repairs were carried out and in 2019 it was deemed no longer at risk.

Joseph Flint was an early 19th-century shopkeeper in the village of Charlwood on the Surrey/Sussex border. Unlike most residents at the time, he was a Protestant Nonconformist and from around 1814 worshipped in a cottage with a small group of like-minded people rather than at St Nicholas' Church, the Anglican parish church. Meanwhile, during the Napoleonic Wars, a barracks existed in the Sussex market town of Horsham. A wooden guardroom or officers' mess was erected there in about 1800. After the war the barracks was decommissioned, and the timber mess building was dismantled and transported on wagons to Charlwood. There the "strange [and] quaint" structure was re-erected in a field on a dirt track north of the village, and on 15 November 1816 it opened as an Independent Calvinistic chapel for Flint and his fellow worshippers. The opening sermons at Charlwood Union Chapel, as it was originally called, were preached by ministers from chapels at Epsom and Dorking. Epsom had an Independent Calvinistic chapel of its own—the denomination was "closely associated with Surrey" in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Bugby Chapel was opened there in 1779.

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