Tents, Tabernacles, and Gospel Halls: A Religious Vernacular in Ulster

This paper examines the small meeting halls that are associated with Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster,1 taking a design perspective. Design here is understood to be concerned with the ways that people create things and environments to serve their needs, and with how those things reflect “the decisions and choices of human beings” embedded in differing contexts.2 The meeting halls are generally small buildings, established as a regular place to meet by people who take on a personal responsibility for sharing their faith. Associated with strongly felt religious conviction, they are built from the modest resources of independent groups of believers and placed where space can be found in their locality. In order to grasp the wider spatial network that each building is a part of, an inventory has been created linked to topographic information to form a “deep map.”3 Although this paper does not present this aspect of the research, the map provides contextual data and underpins a concern with accommodating heterogeneity and accounting for holism. This map includes approximately 900 halls in Ulster, with about 400 extant today. They date from the late nineteenth-century, but a great many were built in the 1920s and 30s. Generally, hall buildings follow on from peripatetic practices such as cottage meetings and gospel missions in tents and portable halls. The buildings that result depend upon their time, context and the decisions of the ‘design constituency’ that produce them.4 The result is a network of heterogeneous buildings distributed across Ulster that afford a central space to meet in –a hall.