Revd John Wesley (1703 – 1791)

Unveiled by the Mayor of Salisbury, Bobbie Chettleburgh, in December 2009 on the Salisbury Methodist Church in St Edmund’s Church Street. A year after Wesley was ordained a priest in September 1728 he joined his brother and others in a religious study group that was derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. He visited Salisbury in 1738 to see his widowed mother and tell her about a momentous religious experience he had just undergone. In the following years he stopped at Salisbury forty times on his way to the West Country as Methodist groups formed and chapels were built. The first Methodist society in central southern England was set up in Salisbury in 1750 and a suitable building erected in St Edmund’s Church Street nine years later.