The chapel and photographic laboratory
In 1806, a Baptist Chapel was established in a yard leading off Crook Street. Within ten years, though, a new thoroughfare, Hamilton Place, was laid out, linking Northgate Street and Crook Street, destroying the yard in the process. The chapel was perhaps the first building on the new frontage. Little trace of the chapel survived archaeologically, as the Will R Rose photographic laboratory that was built on the same site in 1915 occupied virtually the same footprint. Its cellars had destroyed most (but not all) of the foundations that remained.
Very little survived of the former Baptist Chapel: most traces had been destroyed by the construction of the basement that served as the darkroom for the Will R Rose photographic laboratory constructed on the site in 1915. Only in pile cut [2001] was any structural evidence that might relate to the chapel recovered and even this was badly disturbed. A new block was added to the west of the laboratories in 1956 to process colour films, which were becoming more widespread at that time. Its substantial pile foundations and drains had badly disturbed the remains of the front parlours and living rooms of the nineteenth-century terraced housing.