A plain interwar church by Roberts & Willman of Taunton, with good carved figures on the main front and a functional interior with concrete frame exposed to view.

The parish was erected in 1938 and in the same year a new church was built on the western edge of Salisbury to serve the expanding population in the new houses being built there. On stylistic grounds, the building is clearly one of several church designs in the diocese by Roberts & Willman of Taunton. An evidently intended sanctuary was never built. Today the church is served from St Osmund’s, Salisbury.

Description

The church is not orientated; the liturgical east end faces just east of north. The building is rectangular on plan with a continuous shallow pitched roof over all. The church is constructed with a reinforced concrete frame, with external cladding of red brick laid in stretcher bond and roof coverings of blue tiles. The gabled entrance front has a rectangular central doorway with a square brick surround supporting good carved stone statues of Our Lady and St John, serving as rood figures for a corpus attached to the cross-forming mullion and transom of the round-headed window above. Both this window and the small windows to either side have raised brick surrounds. The main front is returned for one bay on each side with a plain parapet. Beyond this bay the side walls extend for six bays with narrow, windowless flat-roofed aisles, rectangular clerestory windows (renewed in uPVC) and a brick-on-edge cornice below the eaves of the main roof. The (liturgical) east end wall is blind and appears unfinished, with the frame exposed.

Inside the church the concrete frames are also fully exposed, with straight-headed openings between the legs of each frame to the narrow passage aisles, which have dados of bare-faced brick. The clerestory walls are plastered and the ceiling between the frames is boarded and painted. There is a timber western gallery with the entrance lobby beneath. At the east end there is no structural chancel or sanctuary but a simple stepped timber dais with a modern stone altar. Some of the other fittings, including the wooden benches and the octagonal stone font, are probably original.

Heritage Details