Hinckley can claim to be the oldest parish in the Diocese of Nottingham. The mission was established in 1759 by Fr Thomas Norton OP from Louvain, and the present church is the third. The first, built for the Dominicans in 1824 by Joseph Ireland, survived until 1976, although replaced by a new church on an adjacent site in the 1950s. This second church was in turn replaced in 1992 by the present church, a large spreading building with a spacious interior arranged on a radial plan and enhanced by stained glass windows. The special interest of the site lies more in its history than in the architecture of the present buildings.

Hinckley can claim to be the oldest parish in the Diocese of Nottingham. The mission was established in 1759 by Fr Thomas Norton OP from Louvain, and the parish has recently celebrated its 250th anniversary. The present church is the third. The first was a chapel built by the Dominicans in 1824 from designs by Joseph Ireland, alongside a house built at the same time to serve as a priory. In 1838 a turret with a bell was added, with Home Office permission (Little, 120), and in 1885 the church was lengthened by the addition of an apse and domed turret. A presbytery was added in 1931.

Although the 1820s church survived until 1976, it had been in effect replaced by a new brick church on an adjacent site, built in 1957-8 to the designs by Frank Brown of Brown & Sharp. In 1992 the 1950s building was itself replaced by the present church, designed by Brian Rush of B. A. Rush & Associates (contractors Try Construction Ltd). More recently a large new hall has been built to the designs of Montague Architects.

Description

The church is a large modern building under a single broad shallow-pitched roof. The walls are faced with red brick laid in stretcher bond with blue brick dressings; the roof is covered with Roman tiles. The main front is broad with a circular brick tower rising in the centre of an asymmetrical canted gable. The tower has a white-painted timber upper stage and the gable wall on either side is pierced with slit windows. To the left of the tower at ground level is a main entrance recessed from the wall line under a broad flat arch of blue brick. The low brick side walls of the building have irregular fenestration. At the liturgical east end of the church is a triple pointed upstand with a large skylight in the roof over the sanctuary.

Internally the church space has a radial plan, emphasised by the roof planes radiating from the west tower.  The side walls are plastered and painted and pierced on the south side by slit windows with stained glass. Over the west entrance is a wide timber gallery. The east end wall of the sanctuary is faced in bare brick, pierced by slit windows and lit by a large skylight above and by a wide window on the north side, with a figure of Our Lord and his disciples in stained glass, from the old church. The Stations of the Cross were also re-used, but most of the remaining fittings are modern.

Heritage Details