New Road Baptist plaque

During the religious upheavals of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars, new religious groups emerged, notably the Baptists. They believed in adult baptism and separated from the national Church, believing each Baptist congregation should govern itself.  The Baptists suffered intense persecution. In Oxford from the mid-1650s onwards, they met privately together at the house of Richard Tidmarsh, a tanner by trade and, according to tradition, this congregation baptized members in Castle Mill Stream. Though Tidmarsh’s house no longer survives, his community is commemorated by a plaque on New Road, set up in 1953 when Oxford once again experienced a diversity of religious beliefs and identities.

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