Museums

Wesley's Chapel, Museum of Methodism and John Wesley's House

Where John Wesley lived, preached and died, with the museum of the movement he began in the crypt.

Also in Sacred London.

John Wesley was a Church of England priest who spent fifty years riding the country to preach to people the parish system was not reaching: miners, weavers and the poor of the new industrial towns. At Oxford he and his brother Charles had belonged to a small group whose strict timetable of study, prayer and prison visiting got them mocked as Methodists, and the nickname stuck to the movement that grew out of his preaching. He rode perhaps a quarter of a million miles and preached more than forty thousand sermons; Charles wrote the hymns, several thousand of them. Wesley never intended to leave the Church of England, and Methodism only became a separate church after his death.

He built this chapel in 1778, the first the Methodists put up in London for the purpose, and lived in the house beside it from 1779 until he died there in 1791. The house is kept as he had it, down to his study and the electrical machine he used to treat melancholy — he thought electricity the great unexploited medicine of the age and wrote a book arguing for it. He is buried behind the chapel and his mother Susanna lies across the road in Bunhill Fields. Margaret Thatcher was married in the chapel in 1951.

The Museum of Methodism is in the crypt, with a collection of some fifteen thousand objects, Wesley's teapot among them. Chapel, house and museum are all free.

Where

49 City Road, EC1Y 1AU

Nearest station

Old Street · 3 min walk

Hours

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 6 September 2026.

Closed to visitors on Sundays and Mondays. The chapel holds Sunday worship; the times are on its own site rather than here.

NearbyMuseums

• Honourable Artillery Company Museum2 min walk
• British Red Cross Museum and Archives6 min walk
• Rivington Place7 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Lantana ShoreditchBreakfast & Brunch1 min walk
• Ozone Coffee RoastersCoffee1 min walk
• Bunhill FieldsLiterary London2 min walk

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