Congregational Church of England and Wales

In 1782 George Gold, minister of the Brickfields Congregational church in West Ham, began to hold services in a hired house at Barking. A church was formally constituted in 1785, and a meeting-house erected in the Broadway. In 1829 the congregation was estimated at 350-400. The church, which had been enlarged in 1805, was rebuilt in 1824-1826, during the pastorate of George Corney. Joseph Smedmore promoted the erection of a new and larger building, opened in 1864, and the addition of new schoolrooms in 1877. After the First World War, when many residents in the older part of Barking were moving into the new houses north of the railway, the church sold its building in the Broadway, and in 1929 erected a new one in Upney Lane. The church joined the United Reformed Church in 1973.

Source: A History of the County of Essex: Volume 5 (1966), pp. 231-233.