Building » Middleton (Boarshaw) – St Agnes and St John Fisher

Middleton (Boarshaw) – St Agnes and St John Fisher

Boarshaw Road, Boarshaw, Middleton M24

A modest building of the early 1960s, originally intended principally as a parish hall.  The simply fitted interior has been altered very little.

The building was originally known as St Peter’s church hall and was presumably intended as a hall for St Peter’s parish. It was designed as a dual purpose building for use as a social hall and also as a chapel.  The main hall was designed to accommodate 200 people, with a smaller room adjoining for meetings and a sanctuary and sacristies at one end of the hall which could be separated off from the main body by a sliding partition.

Description

This is a modest building in a very simplified neo-Georgian style. The plan comprises the rectangular main hall with a shallow-pitched hipped roof, a lower flat-roofed forebuilding across the whole of the main front, a lower transeptal projection on one side containing the meeting room and a prominent brick chimney rising at the rear like a small campanile.  The walls are faced with red Staffordshire bricks, the pitched roofs are covered with brown sand-faced tiles and the flat roofs are felted. The forebuilding has a central glazed entrance door and five small segment-headed openings, originally with stone surrounds but now with brick arches and aluminium widows. In the hall end wall above are three plain sash windows.  On the (liturgical) south elevation the main hall is lit by two pairs of tall small-paned windows flanked by single windows of the same size.

The interior is simply finished with a woodblock floor, walls which are partly plastered and partly bare-faced brick and a boarded ceiling. The windows are clear-glazed.  The sanctuary with its altar and segmental canopy appears to have been little altered, although the original altar rails have been removed.

Heritage Details

Architect: Richard Byrom, Hill & Partners of Bury

Original Date: 1963

Conservation Area: No

Listed Grade: Not Listed