This site gives a lot of information about the present activities of the church but also included a detailed "A brief history of Tilehouse Street Baptist Church" which includes quite a bit about the links with John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim's Progress) and the early days of prosecution before the Toleration Act of 1689.

"The first Hitchin Baptist was probably Henry Denne, who was the vicar of Pirton. Denne had been appointed as a lecturer at the Hitchin Parish church in 1642, but he used his lectures mostly to denounce the practice of infant baptism. When forced to resign, he led away with him many of the people he had won over by his eloquence – a group punningly referred to by the traditionalists as his "Denne of thieves". Excommunicated from the Church, he continued to preach wherever he could, and when thrown into prison in 1664 for baptising some adults, he then set about converting his fellow prisoners!"

The church is of of particular interest because it is one of the more important Baptist churches within Hertfordshire and its birth records (on the IGI at familysearch) start in 1717.

March 2010

Corrected link, additional quote, and reformatted