Barnard eventually vested the Westgate Meeting to a body of thirteen Members/Trustees, including: a book binder, a tallow chandler, a glover, a haberdasher of hats, a master dyer, a clockmaker, Thomas Barrett, and Thomas Fissenden, an apothecary with a ‘physic garden’ whose site is now commemorated by the name of Garden Street Lewes. The Trust Deeds of Westgate Chapel had laid down that the building was to be used by Protestant Dissenters “for the worship of Almighty God”.
Lewes was then and still is the central town of a rural community, some members of the congregation would ride in to the town and leave their horses underneath the meetinghouse in the five stables, only one of which now remains. The minister would come round the back of Bull Lane by the stable yard, and climb an enclosed ladder up to preach from the pulpit or ‘preaching station’ high up in the south wall of the Chapel. This practice of having to go round the back, to enter the pulpit stopped when they built the Ministers Vestry, which was originally built on stilts in 1741. The Ministers Vestry is now a beautiful cosy room with extraordinary far-reaching views of the Downs out of the windows to its back and front. The walls of the Ministers Vestry are lined with dark wooden shelves full of battered old books about understanding the Bible, with titles like the Christian Examiner and Ecclesiastical History. This was the original Lewes Town library. People would leave a deposit to borrow a book. It might seem such books were narrow by today’s standards, but at the time these books were radical reading as they questioned the basis for society in their day. The Bible at the time was seen by English society as the basis for authority of society. It was used and regarded as the foundation for just about everything, law, science and other traditional studies

NOTE (General Baptists were like independents except that they believed in adult baptism by immersion, rather than the christening of a baby or child.)