Methodism took root in Oxford despite the bar on non-Anglicans by the university, writes CHRIS KOENIG

Would anyone mourn those hideous Oxfordshire County Council offices in Castle Street, Oxford, were the city ever to become a unitary authority and render them redundant?

I doubt it, but then I still remember that bold, permanent-looking monument to its Victorian age, the Salvation Army Citadel, built in 1888, which those impermanent-looking offices replaced in 1970. But it is a funny thing, fashion.

I also remember that there were some who thought that its battlements complemented wonderfully those of the real castle down the road and others who disliked it and could not see it replaced fast enough with something secular and functional.

Oxford University long had a soft spot for the Sally Army, even granting its founder William Booth, better known as the General, an honorary doctorate.

General Booth began his working life as a Wesleyan Methodist preacher before founding the Army in 1878. Certainly Methodists track their roots back to Oxford.

The very word, from the Greek methodos meaning rule, was coined here in the 18th century and used to describe a group of serious-minded students who were members of something called the Holy Club.

Together with the brothers John and Charles Wesley, both undergraduates at Christ Church, these students met together at fixed times in order to instil method and regularity into their study of religion and prayer.

Many of the little chapels dotted all over Oxford and Oxfordshire, many now converted into houses or even garages, descend from this movement though some date from the Old Dissent: Quakers, Baptists, Presbytarians and Independents among others.

Interesting though that Methodism took root in Oxford since it was not until 1871 that various Acts of Parliament excluding non-Anglicans from entering Oxford University, designed to exclude Roman Catholics but also catching out many non-conformists, were finally repealed.

Some nonconformists got round the Test Act, for instance, by declaring that they were really Anglicans who simply disapproved of some Anglican practices: the sign of the cross at baptism, wearing surplices, and wedding rings, for instance.

Oxfordshire is rich in nonconformist chapels, the Baptist one at Cote dating from the early 18th century probably being the most picturesque, though the baroque Wesleyian converted mansion on Burford High Street is the most splendid even if the urns on its roof and next to its entrance stairs have long since been removed to Cornbury Park, Charlbury.

Nonconformists were persecuted from Elizabethan times. Even if the persecution officially stopped in the mid-19th century when Methodism was in its heyday, many have argued that it prospered in spite of a cold shouldering from the established church and attacks from most of the great Victorian writers including Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, all of whom ridiculed them without mercy.

Oxford graduates Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher both acknowledged gratitude for their early Methodist training, with Wilson declaring that the Labour movement owed more to Methodism than Marx, but in later life found that it was simply inconvenient, socially, to go on avowing what had become a working class faith.

But all those Oxfordshire chapels still attest to a stubborn British spirit of industry. The great attraction they had for many was that they were not preached to from above about the trials of being poor. Many of the Methodists were the poor. It was natural, really, that the militant Salvation Army should grow from such soil.