ABSTRACT

Situated in a pleasant Cheshire hamlet, Englesea Brook Chapel and Museum tells the story of the Primitive Methodists, one of several splinter groups in British Methodism that emerged in the early part of the nineteenth century. Not everyone in British Methodism was pleased at the prospect of a museum telling this story when it became a possibility in the 1980s. To some it appeared to run against the spirit of Methodist unity that had existed since the establishment of the Methodist Church in 1932. The fear was that the museum would encourage people to live in the past and open up old wounds.