About GURC St Columba

Gosport United Reformed Church, St Columba formed in 2017 through the merger of Bury Road and St Columba’s Churches.

Bury Road Church

Bury Road was a Congregational Church until the Act of Union that formed the United Reformed Church in 1972. It has a history dating back to 1663 at the time of the Dissenters shortly after the English Civil War and the union with Scotland. This was an uneasy time; Charles II was on the throne and the period was characterised by religious tensions.

Among its more famous Ministers was Revd Dr David Bogue (1777-1825) who founded the London Missionary Society and instigated the National Congregational Union.

The church stood in the High Street, on the site that used to be the Post Office opposite what is now the Travelodge, until 1941 when it was destroyed by enemy action. The new church building in Bury Road was opened in 1957, the congregation having met in the Little Chapel in Anglesey Road and the Crossways Hall in the intervening period. Church members included several of the influential families in Gosport, the Nicholsons, Blakes and Lapthorns were all members and did much to develop the town and it’s industries

Sadly the cost of maintaining such an enormous building became beyond the means of the congregation and in January 2017 the church reluctantly took the decision to amalgamate with their sister congregation at St Columba’s in Elson.

St Columba’s Church

The founding of a Presbyterian Church in Gosport was first discussed in 1954 at a meeting of the Church Extension Committee of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Portsmouth. Under the inspiration of Revd Calvert, the Minister of St Andrew’s, the twenty or so families who travelled to Portsmouth each Sunday looked forward with hope and faith to this new church being built.

A preaching station was established in Gosport, meeting first at the chapel in St George’s Barracks while the church was being built. The first Minister was inducted in May 1956 and the new church building in Elson Road was opened in April the following year.

St Columba’s was a Presbyterian Church until the 1972 Act of Union that formed the United Reformed Church and operated independently from Bury Road. The churches started to become more involved with one another from about 1987 onwards when a husband and wife team, Revds Brian and Susan Nuttall, took over both churches, Brian at Bury Road and Susan at St Columba’s. In the years since 2010 St Columba’s and Bury Road moved ever closer together eventually sharing one Minister and forging ever closer links which led to our amalgamation in 2017, almost exactly 60 years after the church first opened.