A brick church of the late 1930s by a local firm of architects. It is of a distinctive and unusual, angular design with passage aisles, and contains some furnishings of note, including items from Cotton College and church.

The church was built in 1938 (foundation stone 27 May) to the designs of the long-established (since 1874) and still-practising firm of local architects, Wood, Goldstraw & Yorath, who have undertaken many Catholic commissions. The builders were Beddoes & O’Dair of Tean. The church is served from St Giles, Cheadle.

Description

The church is built of buff brick and has an interesting, angular profile with simple lines. It consists of a nave with passage aisles, a sanctuary, and sacristies. The centre of the entrance front is brought forward and has a tall rectangular window over the doorway. The most distinctive feature of the building are the side walls of the nave which have three tall projections with large rectangular windows and, between these, raked faces covered with concrete tiles – a slightly more modernistic version of the kind of modelling of side elevations that G. B. Cox was doing about the same time.

The unusual nature of the exterior is expressed internally in what are, effectively, internal buttresses through which passage aisles are driven. The inclined parts between the buttresses are strongly expressed. The roof trusses have a tie-beam, a king post and struts. The walls are plastered and whitened. The pews were brought here from St Wilfrid’s, Cotton, which in turn had acquired them from Cotton College. The church also has obtained a two metre-high Crucifix from Cotton which is intended to be restored and installed on the end wall of the sanctuary. The Lady Chapel has an Art Deco-style stone altar and a mosaic and opus sectile reredos.At the entrance to the sanctuary there are two low walls, one for kneeling communicants and one for the sanctuary proper.

Heritage Details