Category Archives: Sacred Places

Gothic New Zealand: Auckland 2

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Old St Mary's Church, Auckland, New Zealand

Old St Mary’s Church, Auckland, New Zealand

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

The city of Auckland has a special place in the history of the Anglican Church in New Zealand, because it was the base from which Bishop George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878) set up missions across the two islands as the first and only Bishop of New Zealand between 1841 and 1858.

Selwyn, who rowed in the first ever Oxford-Cambridge boat race and after whom Selwyn College is named, was a fellow of St John’s College when the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society, began to promote the idea that a truly Christian building should be built in the Gothic manner.

As Bishop of New Zealand he had to face the fact that masonry architecture was out of reach:  the cost and time involved in building in stone meant that the first New Zealand churches had to be timber.

But they could still be Gothic, and the Anglican community in Auckland outgrew a succession of churches until what is now called Old St Mary’s was begun in 1886 to the ambitious designs of Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898).  Mountfort was a prolific first-generation New Zealand architect, and at St Mary’s he provided all the detail that would be found in a much larger stone-built European cathedral, with a three-sided sanctuary and lancet windows under a generous cat-slide roof.

The largest timber church in the world, it was designated as Auckland’s Anglican Cathedral in 1887 and was completed in 1898.

Its much larger successor, Holy Trinity Cathedral, was begun in 1959 to a reduced version of a twenty-year-old design by Charles Towle that had been stalled by the start of the Second World War.  The choir, transepts and crossing – reminiscent of Sir Edward Maufe’s contemporary Guildford Cathedral in Surrey – were completed in 1973.

The nave, to a much lighter design with a glazed west wall by Richard Toy, was added in 1991-5.  Now a further chapel, to the liturgical east (geographical south) is under way, due to be completed by Christmas 2014, the bicentenary of the arrival of Christianity on the North Island:  http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/digest/index.cfm/2012/5/8/Dramatic-chapel-for-Holy-Trinity.

The conjunction between the two is vibrant:  it’s a very special interior space.  Next door, Old St Mary’s stands – a very different, antique interior – on a new site.  It was transported bodily across the road and turned ninety degrees in 1982.

Update:  Stewart Buckthorp has added a very useful and detailed comment to this article.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

Gothic New Zealand: Auckland 1

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St Stephen's Chapel, Auckland, New Zealand

St Stephen’s Chapel, Auckland, New Zealand

St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

It’s all too easy to forget how much history is packed into the nineteenth-century outposts of the British empire.  A country like New Zealand grew to maturity within two or three generations, who brought their baggage with them and established a home-from-home in a land that belonged to others.

When I visited Auckland to lecture to the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society, I wanted to see as many nineteenth-century churches as possible for a lecture I’m researching on Antipodean Gothic architecture.  My host Anne Gambrill propelled me in record time to a succession of unexpected treasures.

She took me to the tiny cruciform St Stephen’s Chapel at Judges Bay, no bigger than a modest bungalow, where the original Constitution of the Church of the Province of New Zealand was signed in 1857 – a location I’d probably not have found unassisted.

She also alerted me to St Matthew’s Church in the city-centre, unmistakably a design by the British architect John Loughborough Pearson, who was responsible for Truro Cathedral in England and St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane.

In fact, the design was completed after his death in 1898 by his son Frank Loughborough Pearson.  This tall, chaste, cruciform, stone-vaulted building was completed in 1905, though without the intended spire.

As St Matthew-in-the-City, the parish has a proud record of social activism:  http://www.stmatthews.org.nz.

The mother church of the Catholic diocese of Auckland is the ornate St Patrick’s Cathedral, designed by the Auckland father-and-son practice of Edward (1824/5-1895) and Thomas Mahoney (1855-1923) and completed in 1908.  The third church on the site, St Patrick’s is revered as the base of the original Catholic mission on North Island, led by Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier (1801-1871).

The nineteenth-century development of New Zealand churches – alike in the sense of congregations and buildings – was extremely fast.  An entire heritage of individual endeavour and architectural heritage evolved within the first three generations of Europeans to settle.

And each of those church-building generations, Catholic and Anglican alike, looked back to the home country for the styles and imagery of their places of worship.

The Anglican diocese of Auckland, however, ended up with a more complex and distinctive architectural legacy…

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

Canterbury tolls

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Canterbury Cathedral, Kent

Canterbury Cathedral, Kent

I visited Canterbury for the first time in my life last month, and the only reason I didn’t visit the Cathedral was because it would have cost me £8.00 to get in and I had less than an hour.

Charging people to visit places of worship turns them into tourist shrines.  Originally they were shrines for believers.

The huge cost of building the great churches and monasteries in the Middle Ages was covered by milking pilgrims to supplement donations from the great, the good and the not-so-good.

According to the journalist Alex Kirby, writing in The Times (February 4th 2012), twelve of the forty-four major places of worship in the Association of British Cathedrals charge the public for entry outside service times.

Mr Ben Fuller, in a letter to The Times following Alex Kirby’s article (February 6th), makes the suggestion that the Association (which embraces major Anglican, Catholic and Methodist places of worship) should operate a membership-card scheme like the National Trust and English Heritage.

He points out that Church of England members are irked at having to pay to visit their own diocesan cathedral.

They could receive cards as evidence of their subscribing membership of the Church, while other believers as well as faithless tourists would have a ready means of contributing to the upkeep of these venerable and expensive buildings.

This in turn might increase what retailers call “footfall”, which would swell the takings in the restaurants and souvenir stalls that places of worship generally provide.

And those of us who like sometimes to sit in a church to think and reflect – without taking part in a service or making any fuss – could do so with a clear conscience.

Update:  Mr Brian Gant followed up Ben Fuller’s letter in the February 7th edition of The Times, pouring cold water on the idea of a National Trust-style membership card because it “would probably not contribute a large enough sum of money to individual buildings to enable them to abolish entry charges unless there was a very considerable take-up of membership”.  Of course!  The whole idea is to get more people into churches.  Charging them nearly £10 a time isn’t a particularly promising approach, especially for families and the less affluent.

The Church of England isn’t noted for its success in encouraging increasing numbers of worshippers through its doors in recent decades.  The National Trust, on the other hand, has proved to be a roaring success.  Both institutions add immeasurably to the spiritual and emotional wealth of the country, uplifting citizens and visitors alike.

It’s a pity the Church isn’t as enterprising as the Trust.

Further update:  In the February 9th edition of The Times there were two further letters, from the Very Rev Charles Taylor, Dean of Peterborough, showing that it is possible to maintain free public access to a great religious building and from Scirard Lancelyn Green providing figures suggesting that the economic cost of a casual visit to a cathedral, stripped of parochial subsidy, is in the region of £10 per head.

 

Outside the box

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I didn’t realise when I first posted an article about St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield how many of my neighbours I would stir up.

A local resident started a website to campaign for the future of the building – http://sthildas.webs.com/:  the associated petition attracted over three hundred signatures, most of them local.

I did an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield and an article has appeared in the Sheffield Star newspaper.

Local people woke up to the probability that a distinguished local landmark is about to disappear, and those individuals who have a past connection with St Hilda’s were particularly upset that it could disappear.

Since it finally closed for services in 2007, there seems to have been no mention or discussion of its fate in the local media, and I could find no proposal to replace it with any other kind of building.

Local politicians explained, politely but wearily, that the problem had been around for years, and say that they wouldn’t stand in the way of a practical, businesslike scheme to save the building.

Some national amenity societies were encouraging, but their brief is primarily to engage with English Heritage within their guidelines, which are interpreted to the disadvantage of St Hilda’s.

Members of the core group of supporters made contact with the Church Commissioners, who currently still owned the building.

One can’t blame the Church Commissioners for their disinclination to support a redundant building at the expense of the real work of the Church.  It’s a pity, nevertheless, that the situation wasn’t advertised a good deal more loudly in the streets that surround St Hilda’s.

Not everyone loved the building.  One commentator on a web forum said she thought it looked like a factory, which suggests a sanguine view of Sheffield’s industrial architecture.

In the Sheffield Local Studies Library I came across a run of parish magazines from the late 1980s which show exactly how a once thriving parish went downhill.

In April 1988, the month before the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration, the vicar, Father Roger Bellamy, enumerated the previous year’s rites of passage:   baptisms – 11;  confirmations – 0;  marriages – 0;  blessing of a marriage – 1;  funerals – 57.  He noted that fund-raising was “not a great success”.

At the end of 1988 he estimated the active membership of the parish at 42, and expected around ten of those to be “lost”, through age or migration, over the following year.

At the start of 1990 he commented:  “We are facing the realities of our situation:  a small congregation, a largeish building and a remarkable indifference to us from the parish.”

It’s not so much the eleventh hour as after midnight for St Hilda’s, too late – as it turned out – for those of us who live on the spot and care about the building’s existence to audit whether there really were community and commercial needs that it could serve, and to identify any positive, practical proposals to present to the owners and the planners.

Old-fashioned for its date

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St Catherine's Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

When I was collecting signatures for the petition to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield, a gentleman who knows a thing or two about historic building conservation told me a scurrilous tale suggesting that listed-building inspectors aren’t always infallible.

Apparently the very fine Italianate St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield was originally listed Grade II and dated “c1860”.

In fact, the original, temporary St Catherine’s by M E Hadfield & Son was built in 1884 on an entirely different site on Andover Street.

Eventually, the very fine permanent church that stands on the corner of Burngreave Road and Melrose Street was built to designs by the Halifax architects Charles Edward Fox & Son and consecrated with great ceremony in 1926.

Its interior is sumptuous:  black marble columns with Carrara capitals support a coffered ceiling over the nave.  The aisles are vaulted.  The chancel apse has a mosaic frieze with a cornice of Connemara marble, under which stands a baldachino, its canopy supporting a statue of Christ the King.

I’m told that when this date came to light English Heritage promptly delisted it on the grounds that it was so recent – and so old-fashioned for its date.

I’ve found no evidence to back this story, except that St Catherine’s does not appear on the current English Heritage list.

The fact that an authentic-looking Italian basilica was planted in the midst of inner-city Sheffield in the year of the General Strike is actually more significant than if it was simply a mid-Victorian Italianate church.

On the night of its consecration – the Feast of St Catherine – the Bishop of Leeds carried the Sacred Host from the temporary church to the new building in a torchlit procession.  Two thousand Sheffield Catholics turned out to witness their faith, and Canon Charles Leteux pointed out in an address to the crowds that “their public procession made history, for not twenty years before, a similar function in London had been banned by the orders of the Prime Minister”.

Apparently, the legislation banning public processions by clergy and members of the Roman Catholic Church was repealed soon after St Catherine’s opened.

It’s salutary to consider the power and energy that invested organised religion in Britain up to the Second World War.

For this reason, apart from its aesthetic value, St Catherine’s deserves to be recognised for its historic interest.  Fortunately, this church apparently continues to thrive, unlike so many.

Alma de Cuba

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Former St Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool

Former St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool

If you’re looking for somewhere unusual to eat in the centre of Liverpool you can do a lot worse than Alma de Cuba [http://www.alma-de-cuba.com/homepage] on Seel Street, one of the streets running parallel to, and between, Bold Street and Duke Street, within easy walking distance of Lime Street and Liverpool One.

This vibrant, ultra-modern bar restaurant sits inside the oldest surviving Catholic church building in Liverpool.

Indeed, St Peter’s Church is astonishingly old for a post-Reformation Catholic place of worship.  It opened in 1788, ten years after the passing of the first Act of Parliament rescinding the penal laws governing the persecution of Catholics ever since Tudor times.

St Peter’s thrived as a place of worship for nearly two hundred years.

When it could no longer support a local congregation it was transferred in 1976 to the Polish Catholic community and rededicated to Our Lady of Czestochowa.  This attempt to keep it going lasted only two years.

Eventually, the developer Urban Splash rescued the building and it opened as a particularly fine Latin American restaurant in August 2005.

It’s the sort of place where award-winning barmen toss glasses in the air and usually catch them.  And Sunday brunch is enlivened with, of all things, a Gospel choir.

The walls are stripped to the bare brickwork and the ceiling has been removed, revealing the roof-beams.  The ornate Classical sanctuary is intact, with a plate-glass mirror in place of the reredos.

It’s disconcerting to eat and drink and listen to music while staring at the inscription “TU ES PETRUS” – Christ’s words to St Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” [Matthew 16:18].

The contrast between spirituality and hedonism isn’t quite comfortable, and some customers might look askance at the restaurant’s tag-line “Heaven can wait”.

Nevertheless, the building – arguably the most precious archaeological gem of the proud Liverpool Catholic community – survives and is physically safe.  It needn’t be a restaurant for ever, and at least it’s not a pile of rubble.

For so many former places of worship, that’s all too likely a fate.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Reformed chapel

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Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Former Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2012)

Some buildings stick in the memory for entirely sentimental reasons.  I passed the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield every morning in my first five years of schooling.

My Auntie Nellie lived literally next door.  It formed the background to my earliest memories of backyard Bonfire Nights when Uncle Charlie was in charge of the box of matches:  in Coronation year the biggest bang of all came when Auntie Nellie’s new pressure-cooker, inexpertly screwed down, exploded and spattered mushy peas all over the kitchen ceiling.

My latest memory of this thriving temple of Methodism is of my cousin Cathryn singing at a chapel anniversary in the early 1960s.

It’s an austerely attractive, utterly unremarkable building, unlisted, invisible in the Sheffield Local Studies Library index.

Built in 1890, its foundation stones were laid by a star-studded cast of Sheffield’s most important Methodists, such as Jethro and Samson Chambers, Robert Hadfield and Frederick Mappin – all of them men of steel with Attercliffe connections, the latter two later to become baronets.

Its registration for marriages was cancelled because it was no longer used for worship in 1966.

My 1977 image of the building shows the brickwork still encrusted with industrial grime and most of the windows smashed.

No-one would have given tuppence for its chances of survival.

Nowadays it sparkles:  it’s well-maintained;  its windows are renewed and its brickwork is beautifully cleaned.  It serves as the Jamiyat Tableegh ul Islam Mosque.

So historic buildings which are not worth listing can survive if someone finds an appropriate use for them that will justify their upkeep.

Praised with faint damns

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

After I first expressed an interest in the threatened St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I was shown the Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report, from which I quoted in Church going, which recommended the building for listing.

I’ve now seen the latest English Heritage advice-report rejecting that recommendation.  The task of an English Heritage inspector is to evaluate the building in the context of its national significance, according to guidelines which are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/docs/places_of_worship_final.pdf.  At the end of these guidelines (p 20) is a comment that “while all listed buildings are of national importance, local factors may sometimes be of significance”.

St Hilda’s failed the tests when it was last inspected in October 2011.  There’s more than a hint of de haut en bas about the inspector’s silky comments.

The architect, Leslie Moore, is described as a “junior partner” to his better-known father-in-law, which he would be, being the son-in-law.  The original design of 1922 had a “strong resemblance” to Temple Moore’s St Mary, Nunthorpe, but the rather different building of 1935-8 is “simplified down” – as if an imitation is preferable to an adaptation while still not quite good enough.

It’s described as a “plain rectangular box”, which it certainly isn’t, “old-fashioned for [its] date”, built of red engineering brick which is “common”, like most of inter-war Sheffield, and the interior, embellished by George Pace, is “austere”.  Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188.

All this suggests that if St Hilda’s has aesthetic worth, it belongs on a local list in “recognition of its architectural or historical importance and its value to the local community” [see https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/urban-design–conservation/locallisting-.html].  Somehow, it seems not to have been considered so far as a candidate for the local list.

It’s not for me to assert that the national inspector and the local planners are wrong about St Hilda’s.  I think it’s a memorable, exciting, confident building that could once more be put to good use.  None of those epithets is necessarily a criterion for listing.

It would be peevish to point to listed buildings in the locality that might compare with St Hilda’s, but it is pertinent to point to some of the interesting, attractive and potentially useful structures that Sheffield has lost over the decades when listed-building legislation has existed to protect the built environment – the Britannia Music Hall, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools and the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe.

While St Hilda’s stands, there’s a chance of saving it – and it’s worth saving, whether it’s worth listing or not.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Gorton renaissance

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Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

In November 1861 four Franciscan friars arrived in Manchester to set up the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, serving the working-class community that grew up round the nearby railway works.

Their buildings were designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75), who possessed much of the vigour of his father, A W N Pugin, and were constructed largely by the physical labour of the brothers and their parishioners.

The first stone was laid on May 24th 1862, and the three wings of the original monastery were complete by 1867.  To raise funds for the Infant School in 1867 Father Francis hired the Free Trade Hall for a bazaar which raised £1,000.

E W Pugin’s magnificent church, 184ft long, 98ft wide and 100ft high, dominates the streets of Gorton and is clearly visible from central Manchester.

By 1900 the Catholic population of Gorton had increased from 300 to over 6,000.  The fathers saw the parish change from a poor village community, initially dependent on cotton (and badly hit by the effects of the American Civil War), into an industrial inner-city suburb.

For almost a century they provided spiritual and pastoral support to the people of Gorton, and – because many of those people were drawn from Wexford, Waterford and Cork – Gaelic classes, lantern lectures on Irish history and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.  They also exported missionaries to China, Peru and elsewhere.

The surrounding nineteenth-century housing was cleared in the early 1970s, and the Monastery became unsustainable.  Eventually, the Franciscans sold the site for £75,000 to a developer who planned to divide the church into a seven-storey apartment-block but instead went bankrupt.

The abandoned buildings were quickly and badly vandalised.  Lead and slates were removed, and there were repeated arson attacks.  Virtually all the decorative features of interest or value were removed or smashed.

In 1997 the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust bought the Monastery for £1 and began the formidable task of bringing the place back into use.  Cornering funds was not the least of their labours:  the Architectural Heritage Fund, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, New East Manchester (NEM) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) between them chipped in millions.

Fixtures that had disappeared in the dark days of dereliction have returned.  A complete set of twelve statues, stolen from the lofty nave arcades, famously appeared as garden ornaments at Sotheby’s:  Manchester City Council bought them for £25,000 and stored them until September 2011 when they returned to the site for restoration.

The art-dealer Patricia Wengraft [http://www.patwengraf.com/Patricia-Wengraf-Fine-European-Sculpture-and-Works-Art-Intro-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=1] secured the return of the huge crucifix:  http://www.manchester.gov.uk/news/article/1954/monasterys_giant_crucifix_is_hoisted_back_into_place.  The chains to support it had been handed in mysteriously some time before.

I remember the first public opening in September 2005:  people queued down the street, showing immediately how much St Francis’ Monastery meant to local people who’d grown up, been baptised or married here, and had been uprooted.

The Monastery reopened fully as a community, conference and events centre in 2007.  It’s open to the public most Sundays:  see what’s on offer at http://www.themonastery.co.uk/Whats-on.html.

I would have liked to see something similar happen to St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield.

Just because a place of worship is no longer needed for worship doesn’t prevent it having enormous value to people.

But making the transition requires enormous energy, imagination, devotion, acumen – and the creative support of people in power.

Shiregreen waits…

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Preacher man 1

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Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

John Wesley (1703-1791) is a towering figure in the history of the English church.

He forms part of a huge dynasty of clergymen and poets, the son of the writer Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) and older brother of the hymn-writer Charles Wesley (1707-1788), who wrote ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’ and the basis for ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’ among much else.

Though he is recognised as one of the founders of the Methodist church, he was in fact an ordained Anglican priest until his death.  He regarded his ministry as additional to, rather than a replacement for, the Established Church.

Dr Samuel Johnson found his energy irritating:  “John Wesley’s conversation is good, but he is never at leisure.  He is always obliged to go at a certain hour.  This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do.”

This isn’t surprising.  During his long life, his workload as a preacher was prodigious.  One biographer says that he “rode 250,000 miles, gave away 30,000 pounds,…and preached more than 40,000 sermons”.

More often than not, he preached out of doors.  When his followers built their own chapels, he favoured an octagonal plan, of which the best survivor is the Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire (1764).  Originally built as a pure octagon, it was extended in 1802 by lengthening two sides to accommodate regular congregations of over a thousand.

It’s still in use, and visitors are welcome.  It’s a delightful place to be quiet in.  It must be a particularly satisfying space to preach in.  For contact details see http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/heptonstalloctagonalchapel.htm.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.