History

St. Margaret’s Church was built in 1958, towards the end of the construction of the Longhill estate, which lies in the extreme north-east of Hull. The Longhill area has a well defined ‘centre’ and the church is located in it. The church building was a multi-purpose construction, with a fairly flimsy main hall in the middle (with rather more solid altar area), and single story brick flat roof blocks at either end. There were offices at one end and the toilets and kitchen at the other.

The church was, and is, a daughter church to St. Michael’s on Holderness Road. It is very much an ‘estate’ church, whereas St. Michael’s serves a much more socially diverse area which includes other ‘Council housing’ areas but doesn’t draw from them. At it’s height there was a reasonably healthy congregation of several dozen or so. This dwindled in line with all churches on outer estates during the 1960s and 70′s.

There has been a mixed history of church leadership including a Priest, curates and lay ministers. Within this there has been a mixture of ‘churchmanships’ and spiritualities, including people who were against women’s ordination and lay women. The Diocese at one point paid for an additional worker specifically for Longhill, through the ‘Longhill Mission Experiment’, for about ten years.

On Easter Sunday 1992, whilst no-one was working at Longhill, the parish priest withdrew church services with no warning and no fitting end. Of the remaining congregation of a dozen people, a few went to St. Michael’s but most went nowhere. The priest left the parish soon afterwards. The local Roman Catholic Church closed in the early 1990′s, and in 2000 the Salvation Army Church building was closed; the small remaining gathering has met at Link Up ever since.

The ‘Hope of Hull Church’ established itself in the area in the April of 1992, following a mission that led to the creation of a nurture group of local residents. It made use of Link-Up and other local buildings before closing down, with the loss of their brilliant ‘Powerpoint’ programme in the Longhill primary schools, in 2005.