Category Archives: Sacred Places

Spence in Sheffield: St Catherine of Siena, Richmond

St Catherine of Siena Parish Church, Richmond, Sheffield

St Catherine of Siena Parish Church, Richmond, Sheffield

On the strength of his commission for St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, Sheffield, Basil Spence was invited to design a parish church with an attached church hall for the parish of St Catherine of Siena, serving the eastern estates of Richmond and Woodthorpe.

This building was also financed by the compensation payments for bombed inner-city churches – of St Philip, Shalesmoor (1828, demolished 1952) and Christ Church, Attercliffe, (1826, demolished 1953).

The foundation stone was laid on April 11th 1959 and the church was consecrated by Bishop Leslie Hunter on December 5th the same year.

Like St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, St Catherine’s is marked by a tower consisting of two brick pillars, surmounted by a cross, linked by a glazed sacristy corridor to a plain cavity-wall brick nave.

At St Catherine, however, the tower slabs are concave and the nave is lit by narrow slit windows and ends in a windowless semi-circular apse.

The roof consists of laminated timber beams, separated from the walls by a glazed clerestory and a concealed window that lights the sanctuary providing an atmosphere of well-lit privacy.

Basil Spence’s perspective of the proposed design, dated April 1957, shows the original intention to orientate the church north-south with the tower to the east.  The sequence of drawings indicates that in March or April 1958 the decision was taken to realign the church geographically, as well as liturgically, east-west, with the tower to the south.

A glazed screen at the back of the nave, with the organ mounted above the doorway, separates the nave from the community areas which are integral to the design and follow a pattern that Spence had set in designing three churches for the Diocese of Coventry in 1954.

Ronald Pope’s sculpture of St Catherine holding the burning heart before the crucified Christ was placed on the eastern face of the bell-tower and dedicated by Bishop Francis John Taylor on February 13th 1966.

The church was listed Grade II in 1997 for its “strongly sculptural design with a powerful presence”.

Spence in Sheffield: St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue

St Paul’s Parish Church, Wordsworth Avenue, Sheffield

After Basil Spence (Sir Basil from 1960) won the competition to rebuild the bombed Coventry Cathedral in 1950 he became one of the architects to go to for parish church designs, particularly on new housing estates.

Bishop Gorton of Coventry invited Spence to design three new suburban churches, St Oswald, Tile Hill, St Chad, Wood End, Henley Green and St John the Divine, Willenhall (all three opened 1957);  in Leicester, Bishop Williams, explicitly on the recommendation of Neville Gorton, commissioned St Aidan’s, New Parks (1959);  in Sheffield, Spence designed two elegant modern parish churches on opposite sides of the city.

Partly funded by the compensation payments for two bombed churches, St James’ (1789) in the city centre and Emmanuel, Attercliffe (1882), St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, opened in 1959, was built to serve the community that came to live in a post-war extension of the Parson Cross housing estate that Sheffield Corporation had laid out north-west of the city in the late 1930s.

Spence’s design has two conjoined elements.  What looks like a tower is actually two brck pillars surmounted by a cross, and the aisleless nave consists of two parallel brick side walls above which floats the shallow barrel-vault roof.  The double-glazed clerestories and the glass screen end walls bring light into the building:  they were also cheaper and quicker to construct.

Ove Arup & Partners designed the diaframe bracing of the roof reminiscent of Gothic vaulting and serving the same purpose.

The pews were designed by Basil Spence and made of agba, an African mahogany now endangered and in short supply.  The organ, bought from Mount Tabor Methodist Church, Hoyland, and installed in 1962, is mounted on the west gallery.

An African teak slatted screen behind the altar gives privacy to the congregation while making services apparent to the outside world.  As the church website remarks, the glazed ends “prevent the worship of the church being a secret from the community or the worshippers being unaware of what is going on in the area”.

Basil Spence gave the altar candlesticks of hammered iron, and the green appliqué altar frontal was made in 1958 by Beryl Dean (1911-2001) to the design of Anthony Blee, Basil Spence’s son-in-law.

The church silver includes a chalice and paten by the Sheffield silversmith Omar Ramsden (1873-1939).

The total cost was around £30,000.

The English Heritage Grade II* listing description describes St Paul’s as “an unusually transparent design and Spence’s best small churches”.

The Queen of Holderness

St Patrick's Church, Patrington, East Yorkshire

St Patrick’s Church, Patrington, East Yorkshire

St Patrick’s Parish Church in the distant Holderness parish of Patrington is one of the most perfect of English medieval churches.

The “Queen of Holderness” was ranked by Sir John Betjeman as “one of the great buildings of England”.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner comments that it has “a unity of exterior and a unity of interior, a calm perfection in both which one never ceases to admire”.

Built in a single sequence from about 1300, interrupted by the hiatus of the Black Death, and hardly altered since its completion in the following century, the church is an inspiring keynote in the flat East Riding landscape.

The scale of the building comes as a surprise to the modern traveller, even after passing the other great Humberside churches at Howden, Beverley, Hull and Hedon.

One explanation for its magnificence lies in the changing geography of the adjacent coastline:  in the fourteenth century Patrington was the market centre for the hinterland of the lost port of Ravenser and such other townships, long since eaten away by the sea, as Frismarck and Therlesthorp.

In addition, the manor belonged to the Archbishops of York, several of whom are known to have visited and transacted business from Patrington.  These same archbishops were engaged in the great rebuilding of York Minster which was finally completed in 1474.  Robert of Patrington was master mason at York Minster in 1369;  two other named members of the family, Ralph and another Robert, worked in York in succeeding generations.

Within the church are many treasures – the twelve-sided fourteenth-century font, the fine sedilia, piscina and Easter sepulchre in the chancel, and the Jacobean pulpit, dated 1612, part of the major post-Restoration pewing of the church, of which some benches survive in the South Transept.

The upper chamber of the two-storey south porch provides a dramatic view across the church, from which all the entrances to the nave are visible to the sacristan who was responsible for the treasures and documentary records of the church.

This chamber, known in the seventeenth century as the God-house, was used in that period as the twice-yearly meeting-place for the head jury of the manor.

There’s no more magnificent building in the wide open spaces of Holderness.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Pugin’s Gem

St Giles' Roman Catholic Church, Cheadle, Staffordshire

St Giles’ Roman Catholic Church, Cheadle, Staffordshire

Of all the architectural work that Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin carried out for John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, the finest and most complete is the Catholic parish church of St Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire.   (The Anglican parish church in Cheadle is also dedicated to St Giles.)

The Earl was keen to provide the finest of parish churches for the Catholic community in the nearest town to his Alton Towers seat.  As an enlightened Victorian landowner, he specified that construction should be entrusted to “resident artisans of the village” so that “all his dependants should…be benefited by the effects of his munificence”.

His architect set out to present “a perfect revival of the English parish church of the time of Edward I, decidedly the best period of pointed architecture”.

There were a few compromises, especially after the £5,000 budget overran, but in essence St Giles’ represents the physical embodiment of the architectural ideals of the first and greatest of Gothic Revival designers.

He set out his basic principles in The True Principles of Pointed Architecture (1841):

The two great rules for design are these:  first, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety;  second, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.

St Giles’ dominates the skyline for miles around Cheadle, and impresses at close quarters, because the structural features, particularly the 200ft-high tower and the buttresses, are in fact larger than they practically need to be.  Pugin also tweaked the west-east orientation to make best use of the site and to align the west door with the street opposite.

The interior of St Giles’ takes the breath away.  Every inch of wall and column is coloured and gilded.  Each of the windows has tracery of a differing design.  The floor is tiled, and the roof is of English oak.  The painted decoration has tremendous impact:  the ground colours of the north aisle (blue) and the south aisle (red) represent respectively Our Lady and Our Lord.  The glass, floor-tiles, woodwork and ornaments were designed by Pugin, who closely supervised their manufacture.

St Giles’ is special because it is almost entirely the vision of one superbly talented designer.

By the time of the consecration on St Giles’ Day, September 1st 1846, Pugin was putting himself under the stress that five years later led to a complete physical and mental breakdown.

It seems as if he was destined for a short life of brilliant achievement.  He adored the place – “my consolation in all afflictions” – and in many ways it is his finest monument.

He would demur, and no doubt assert that it was built ad majorem Dei gloriam – for the greater glory of God.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

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

Fit for a bishop

St Hilda's Parish Church, West Cliff, Whitby

St Hilda’s Parish Church, West Cliff, Whitby

Churches, like other buildings, don’t get built by accident. They owe their existence to someone’s drive and strength of intention.

On the opposite cliff to the splendidly archaic parish church of St Mary, Whitby, stands the magnificent late-Victorian Gothic church of St Hilda.

Built to serve the Victorian streets of the West Cliff, St Hilda’s is an impressive Gothic Revival composition of 1884-6 by the Newcastle architect, R J Johnson.

It replaced an iron church at the instigation of an ambitious rector, Rev Canon George Austen, who had arrived in Whitby in 1875 from Middlesburgh, where he had initiated a church-building programme [http://www.st-barnabas.net/history], and saw no reason why Whitby and its surrounding parishes should not become a bishopric.

Consequently, St Hilda’s is fit for a bishop, embellished with fine carving and glass by C E Kempe.

The bishop’s throne was installed c1908, and the first suffragan Bishop of Whitby was eventually appointed in 1923, by which time George Austen had become a Chancellor of York Minster.

When he died, aged 94, in 1933 he was, at his own request, brought back to Whitby and buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, which had otherwise been closed to burials for sixty years.

The tower of St Hilda’s, in the style of the late-Victorian church, was completed by G E Charlewood in 1938

The fine Roman Catholic parish church by Matthew Ellison Hadfield (1867) in the town centre is also dedicated to St Hilda – a source of perennial confusion to visitors.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

St Hilda’s abbey

Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

The instantly recognisable ruin of Whitby Abbey on the cliff-top above the harbour is freighted with fourteen centuries of history.

Founded in AD 657 by a Northumbrian princess who became St Hilda, it was the location for the Synod of Whitby (AD 664), which established that the English church would follow Roman rather than Celtic custom.

Nevertheless, St Hilda’s Saxon abbey was designed in the Celtic manner, for parallel communities of monks and nuns, living in single cells but worshipping together.  Of the monks in her time five became bishops; two of them, like her, became saints – St John of Beverley and St Wilfrid of York.  A lay member of her community was Caedmon, traditionally regarded as the earliest English poet.

The first abbey was destroyed by the Danish invaders in AD 867 and refounded in Norman times by one of the knights who fought at Hastings, Reinfrid, who settled here as a monk and developed a Benedictine community in the 1070s.

The existing ruins represent a massive rebuilding, starting in the 1220s, continuing after a fundraising effort in 1334, followed by a distinctive break when a change from lancet windows to Decorated tracery indicates an interruption to the rebuilding programme of perhaps a hundred years between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The final installation of the now-vanished Perpendicular west window was only completed in the fifteenth century.

Shortly after the Dissolution, in March 1540 the abbey precinct passed to Sir Richard Cholmley of Kingthorpe, near Pickering, “the great blacke knight of the North”, whose son, Francis, adapted the abbot’s lodging to make a residence. His descendant, Sir Hugh Cholmley (1632-89) aggrandised his residence Abbey House with an imposing classical Banqueting Hall wing (1672-82), the shell of which houses a modern visitor centre.

The Abbey ruins served as a waymark for mariners, but what now remains is only a vestige. Much of the church, including the tower, still stood in 1711, but the south transept collapsed in 1736, the south wall of the nave in 1762, the nave arcade in 1793, the west window the year after, the central tower on June 25th 1830 and part of the presbytery in 1839.

What was left of the west front was bombarded by the German battle cruisers Von der Tann and Derfflinger on December 16th 1914, and later reinstated, with a section of the nave arcade reassembled incongruously by the north boundary wall, after the Ministry of Works took over the site in 1920.

There are easier ways of visiting the Abbey and the nearby church of St Mary than by walking up the 199 steps from the town. There’s a discreetly hidden car-park, and a tourist bus running a half-hour service during the summer: http://www.coastalandcountry.co.uk/openTopCoach.html.

Opening times for the Abbey are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/whitby-abbey.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Gothic survival: Staunton Harold Church

Staunton Harold Church, Leicestershire:  detail

Staunton Harold Church, Leicestershire: detail

We live in an age when religious extremism causes conflicts that sometimes prove fatal.

So it was in the seventeenth-century, when the repercussions of the English Reformation set Anglicans against Puritans to the point of civil war.

At Staunton Harold, on the border between Derbyshire and Leicestershire, Sir Robert Shirley, 4th baronet, chose to build opposite his hall a new parish church that looks, for all practical purposes, as if it was one or two centuries earlier than its actual date.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England: Leicestershire & Rutland describes it as “completely Gothic, not simply a continuation of the Perp[endicular] style but Gothic in a more conscious and general way”.

Above the west door is an inscription – added in 1662-5 – that is an unambiguous statement of defiance:

In the year 1653

when all thinges Sacred were throughout ye nation

Either demolisht or profaned

Sir Robert Shirley, Barronet,

Founded this church;

Whose singular praise it is,

to haue done the best things in ye worst times,

and

hoped them in the most callamitous.

The righteous shal be had in everlasting remembrance.

For his pains, the Commonwealth government imprisoned Sir Robert in the Tower of London, where he died in 1656.

After the Restoration, the church was completed for Sir Robert’s heir, Sir Seymour Shirley, 5th Baronet (1647-67).

The interior is consistently Jacobean with panelling by William Smith of Melbourne and a nave ceiling signed by Samuel and Zachary Kyrk and dated 1655. The communion plate dates from 1654.

The wrought-iron chancel screen is slightly later, and thought to be by the ironsmith Robert Bakewell.

Staunton Harold Church, which is Grade I listed, is now in the care of the National Trust: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/staunton-harold-church.

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

Gothic survival: St John’s Church, Briggate, Leeds

St John the Evangelist Church, Briggate, Leeds

St John the Evangelist Church, Briggate, Leeds

The term “Gothic Revival” is familiar to anyone with the remotest interest in architecture, but “Gothic Survival” is much rarer.

There’s a splendid example of a Gothic church built after the Reformation but still in the medieval tradition at the end of Leeds’ main shopping street, Briggate, opposite the Grand Theatre.

It was needed because in the early seventeenth century Leeds was expanding as a centre for the wool trade, and the parish church, St Peter’s, became overcrowded.

The church of St John the Evangelist was paid for by Alderman John Harrison (1579–1656), a cloth-merchant and much-loved philanthropist who also provided a market cross, alms-houses and land and a building for the Leeds Grammar School. Leeds’ first historian, Ralph Thoresby, notes that Harrison fitted his doors and wainscots with holes “for the free passage of cats”.

When St John’s was built, 1632-4, it was fully a hundred years since church-building had been commonplace, and the folk-memory of the old masons had faded. The window-tracery is quirky, as if improvised, and the layout is odd: what might be the south aisle is the same size as the nave.

This double nave, with a central arcade, was practical because the preacher was positioned at the centre of the north wall. An elaborate screen separates the chancel area, where communion was celebrated “as in times past”.

St John’s looks superficially like a medieval church, but the panelling, the pulpit and the screens are distinctively Jacobean, with strapwork and obelisks, and the Royal Arms are those of James I & VI, who had died in 1625.

In its layout and decoration, this was a church that followed the ritualistic principles of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud (1573–1645).

The religious turmoil of the time flared up on the consecration day, September 21st 1634. In the morning John Cosin, chaplain to Richard Neile, Archbishop of York, preached a sermon in line with Laud’s principles. The same afternoon, the Puritan first Vicar of the new church, Robert Todd, in his sermon, vehemently attacked Neile’s views and was promptly suspended by the Archbishop. It took a year for John Harrison and Sir Arthur Ingram of Temple Newsam to secure Todd’s reinstatement.

In the early nineteenth century there was a strong possibility St John’s would have been demolished. The south porch was in fact taken down, and the tower was rebuilt in 1838.

Its rarity was recognised by the young architect, Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912). He enlisted the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878), and between them they persuaded the Church authorities in 1865 that it would be cheaper to restore than to rebuild.

The congregation has long since disappeared, and this Grade-I listed church is now maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust.

It’s open over lunchtime from Tuesday to Saturday, and is a welcome haven of calm in the midst of the busy city centre: http://www.visitchurches.org.uk/Ourchurches/Completelistofchurches/Church-of-St-John-the-Evangelist-Leeds-West-Yorkshire.

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

No expense spared 4: Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Liverpool

Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Park Lane, Liverpool

Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Park Lane, Liverpool

One of the most original churches in Liverpool is the Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, the Scandinavian Seamen’s Church, a rendering in brick of the Nordic stave church [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stave_church].

It was built to minister to the pastoral needs of the transitory population of around fifty thousand Scandinavian seamen and emigrants in Liverpool in the early 1880s. It was completed at a cost of 50,000 Swedish crowns in 1884.

Designed by William Douglas Caröe (1857-1938), who was the son of the Danish Consul in Liverpool and a pupil of the architect John Loughborough Pearson, its octagonal form and pyramidal roof with stepped gables and a spectacular concave lead and timber spire highlight its Scandinavian associations.

The minister’s house adjoins the church.

The original worship space was up a half-flight of stairs and consisted of a galleried octagonal space with an open timber vault.

This was floored at gallery level in 1956-61 to create social and recreational space, and as the numbers of seamen visiting Liverpool declined the congregation adapted to serve the needs and welfare of the Scandinavian community in the city and its surrounding region.

Four plaster reliefs, originally part of the reredos and now relocated to the staircase, are by Robert Anning Bell.

Two sculptures, the Madonna and Christ, are by the Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley.

The bell from the former Norwegian Seamen’s Church at St Michael-in-the-Hamlet hangs beside the altar.

The Gustaf Adolf Nordic Congregation in Liverpool operates as the Nordic Church and Cultural Centre, providing a base for Danes, Finns, Icelanders, Norwegians and Swedes in the district and maintaining their unique building for future generations.

Visitors are made welcome, particularly at events: http://nordicliverpool.co.uk. The buffets are memorable.

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.

No expense spared 3: Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Liverpool

Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Among the many fine Victorian buildings in and around Liverpool 8, the Old Hebrew Congregation Syngogue is a particular jewel.

Built 1871-4 to the designs of the brothers William James and George Ashdown Audsley, it is constructed, like St Margaret’s Church on the same side of Princes Road, of red brick dressed with red sandstone.

Its façade combines elements of Gothic and Moorish styles, the pointed west door and the rose window contrasting with the oriental arches of the doorframes and the minarets that once surmounted the turrets.

The spectacular galleried interior has a tall arcade, supported by cast-iron columns with acanthus capitals. The horseshoe arches of the arcade lead the eye to the much more elaborate arch at the east end, which frames another rose window above the marble Ark with painted domes and gold stars.

The initial total cost was £14,975 8s 11d.

The marble pulpit, given in 1874 by the widow of James Braham, faces the bimah, the platform from which the Torah and haftarah are read. This was the gift of David Lewis, founder of the Liverpool department store, “in gratitude to Almighty God for His great goodness”.

The Ark is a replacement of the original which with its holy scrolls was destroyed by arson in May 1979: it was reconstructed and the synagogue restored and reopened in December 1980.

This spectacular place is open to group tours, which feature an exhibition about the history of the congregation: http://www.princesroad.org/#!tours/cfvg.

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.