A small, well-detailed brick church of the 1950s. 

This part of Newcastle used to be known as St Anthony’s. In 1614 Dame Dorothy Lawson built a house here, with a Catholic chapel. Many industries flourished around here; there were a quarry, brick works, a pottery, lead works, chemical works, and several coal mines. Later there were shipyards close by. In the early seventeenth century, Trinity House, Newcastle, ordered trees to be cut from Walker Woods, for use in making a new roof for their chapel; the woods covered the riverside.

The parish was erected in 1951 and the present church built in 1954. The identity of the architect has not been established, but on stylistic grounds it is considered likely to be by Robert Burke of Newcastle (compare, for example, with Backworth, qv).  

Description

The church has stretcher bond brick walls with concrete dressings, and a red-tiled pitched roof with gable copings and concrete finials on gabled transepts. The east end to Monkchester Road has a projecting central section with pointed gable above a course of bricks on end, on a thin concrete string; below the gable a concrete high relief cross rises from a stepped concrete string. High in the wall is a single concrete surround to three round-headed windows above long grid-patterned concrete panels. Flanking this are short transepts, the south one also an entrance porch. The transepts and four-bay aisled nave have three round-headed lights, lesser areas one.  All windows have bracketed sloping drip moulding.

Inside, a new wide narthex has toilets and a kitchen below the west gallery. There are unmoulded round arches to the aisles while the nave ceiling has a shallow barrel-vault, meeting transepts with a groined vault over sanctuary. There are two wide steps to the sanctuary, which contains white marble furnishings with some brown marble inlay; a cream marble panel surrounds the window. There is a Gothic-style hexagonal font near the sanctuary steps.

Heritage Details