Former East Moors Forward Movement Mission Hall (now Eastmoors Youth Centre)

On the S side of Sanquhar Street, at the E end near the junction with Ordell Street.

The former Forward Movement hall on Sanquhar Street in Splott was built in 1892. The Forward Movement was the missionary wing of the Calvinistic Methodist Church, a denomination traditionally strong in the rural Welsh speaking areas, and the oldest protestant denomination with purely Welsh origins. As South Wales industrialised through the C18 and C19 the leaders of the church sought to win converts in South East Wales where populations were expanding rapidly and becoming more anglicised.

The Calvinist Methodists began a series of ‘English Causes’ campaigns in 1869. In 1892 they established the ‘The Society for Church Extension and Mission Work’, or the ‘Forward Movement’. The aim was to bring evangelical preaching to the non-religious working classes of Cardiff, Newport and the surrounding industrial communities. There was paternal concern over the moral wellbeing of working class communities and financial backing from the coal millionaires John Cory and Edward Davies Llandinam.

John Pugh, minister at Clifton Church in nearby Adamsdown (listed No.18641) was a founder of the movement and was appointed as its first superintendent. He had been preaching in the area and elsewhere and was well known for his impassioned open air speaking. Pugh, along with another leading figure in the movement, Seth Joshua, started with the use of tents to hold revival meetings and attract large crowds under cover. Once a congregation was established a hall was then built and the tented meetings moved onto a new community. Splott is known to be the first community where the revival meetings were undertaken.

It is reported that nearly 50 halls were built in total but only 5 are known to survive. Other halls survive at Malpas (Evangelical Church. 1898), Whitchurch Road, Cardiff (Heath Evangelical Church. 1900 rebuilt 1907), Monthermer Road, Cardiff (Crwys Hall, now Highfields Church. 1900), and Neath (1903. Listed GII). The halls are known to be varied in architectural style but always ambitious in size and seating capacity to attract as many members as possible.

The East Moors hall is shown on the 2nd ed OS Map of 1901, with a rear extension already added by that point. It was the first Mission Hall to be built and was an integral part of the rapid development of Splott at the very end of the C19. It was constructed in a narrow angled plot at the very edge of the Splott Farm lands and located between the grid pattern of housing to the N and E and the timber yards and the Bute Gas Works S of Sanquhar

Street and East Tyndall Street. Its design of a large box-like hall, almost filling the plot it sits in, and with a frontage squared to Sanquhar Street is suggestive of the ambitious efforts that the Movement made to bring religion to the community of Splott – utilising a piece of land in between the housing and the industrial workplaces with limited effort at this stage towards an elaborate architectural design. An early undated photograph shows a gable in between the hall and frontage block with ‘F.M. INSTITUTE HALL’ in large lettering. The hall was used by its congregation until they moved to the Jerusalem Calvinistic Methodist Church on Walker Road (dem. 1987) and was then later converted for use as a youth community centre. It continues to provide important facilities for the inhabitants of Splott.