Quakers Friars

Quakers Friars stands in Broadmead, Bristol, on the site of a former Dominican priory built about 1227. The priory’s cloister ruins adjoin the later meeting house, linking two centuries of religious history. Maurice de Gaunt founded the priory just twelve years after the Dominican Order began, and only six years after friars first came to England. The priory church measured 170 feet long and 62 feet wide before its dissolution in 1538. After the Dissolution the buildings were divided among city guilds and private owners, including Dennis Hollister, a prominent Bristol businessman and MP. The site became central to early Quakerism when John Audland and John Camm arrived in 1654. They held the city’s first Quaker meetings in Hollister’s orchard and later in a room above his shop. George Fox visited in 1656 and married Margaret Fell in the first meeting house in 1669. The Quakers bought part of the old priory in 1669 and built a new meeting house in 1670, later enlarged in 1747–49 by architect George Tully with woodwork by Thomas Paty. Nikolaus Pevsner called it the first Quaker building to show such monumentality. Today the building forms part of a modern shopping area, its grand galleried interior now housing restaurants. Visitors can walk past the remaining priory walls and the old orchard site where the first meetings took place. The lantern light and Doric columns still mark the 18th-century meeting house, though its lantern tower is now hidden behind later renovations. The surrounding streets show little trace of the once busy complex, yet the Grade I listed structure keeps the memory of both Blackfriars and early Quaker worship alive.