A  small  church  of  concrete  frame  construction  which  nevertheless makes a bold and original architectural statement. While the longitudinal plan is conventional, the church contains some furnishings of note and is a good example of a church and hall built at the time of and reflecting the emerging reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The baptismal registers date from 1929. Building of the present church started in August 1964. The new building was tailored to the site on which the presbytery had stood for some years.

Description

The main church building is rectangular in plan with a tower at the liturgical southwest corner and a single-storey vestibule adjoining. The tower is an openwork concrete structure which is, as the recent Pevsner volume says, reminiscent of a colliery pit head structure. The main church is a concrete portal frame structure with buff brick infill and strip clerestorey windows at the head of the wall, except on the south side of the sanctuary, facing the road which has a massive window of ten vertical lights. The most distinctive feature of the exterior is the way that the upper part of the south wall is recessed from the vertical members of the frame, leaving them to project like the legs of a massive spider. The roof is slightly curved; the original scheme for the church had a flat roof, so the present arrangement may be a later alteration, or a variation from the time of building.

The interior is a single open space with low windowless aisles on each side, plain walls faced with textured panels, which have square insert dalle de verre panels by Philip Brown on the south side, and clear-glazed clerestorey windows with shallow arched heads following the line of the curving transverse arches of the ceiling. The western vestibule also has a large panel of concrete and coloured glass. The sanctuary has a  flat  ceiling  and  a large  window on the south side. Fittings include bold Stations of the Cross by Roger Smith and original benches. The sanctuary arrangement with freestanding glazed screens is presumably a later reordering.

Heritage Details