Summary – The History of Rosebery Park Baptist Church in Pokesdown

Rosebery Park Baptist Church was founded in 1891.  Consistent with what a church is, that is, a group of people, not a building, the church started as a group of people meeting together and the building followed.  The first building was about half a mile away from the present building, on the junction of Morley Road and Harcourt Road.  After the church moved out, this building was used by the Bournemouth Deaf Centre, and, more recently, Turning Point Church.  Over the following 120 years there have been 13 ministers at Rosebery Park Baptist, with breaks of varying lengths between them; Simon Bartlett is the 14^th.

The building that the church presently meets in was built in 1931 for an independent Baptist church called Keswick Hall.  Numbers attending were declining and they sold the church to Rosebery Park in late 1951.  At the time Rosebery Park had 317 members and in the region of 400 regularly attending.  Since the 1950s, and most especially following the social upheavals of the 1960s, many people left the church in the UK.  Rosebery Park experienced a similar decline.  By 1980 membership was 195 and today it is 34.  We look to God to revive and restore us.