Trinity Methodist Church And Sunday School Trinity Methodist Church, Sunday School And Attached Railings

Trinity Methodist Church, Sunday School and attached railings, Barnard Castle

A Methodist church and attached Sunday School with railings, built in 1894 by the architects Marley & Woodhouse of Bradford. The buildings are constructed of rock-faced stone with ashlar plinth and dressings, and feature a slate roof with stone gable copings and terracotta ridges, finials and a stone spire.

The church is planned with the ritual east facing geographical west. It comprises a nave with a ritual south-west tower, west vestibule, shallow transepts, and chancel, all in the Gothic Revival style.

On the west elevation, steps lead up to paired double boarded doors in gabled surrounds with nook-shafts, pointed arches, and gabled buttresses. Lancets flank either side. Pinnacles rising from the buttresses have high finials in front of a sill-string to a large 5-light window with Geometrical tracery. At the left, paired cusped lancets serve a stair tower with a blind-arcaded frieze beneath a hexagonal hipped roof. On the right, a 3-stage tower contains a 2-light window with tracery in the first stage, two tall lancets in the second, and a tall 2-light window in the third with a clock set in the head under a gable. Gabled angle buttresses rise to the centre of the top stage, which has a chamfered coping below octagonal angle pinnacles flanking a tall spire with bands and lucarnes, topped by a weather-vane finial. All windows are chamfered, set on sill-strings with dripmoulds.

Two-light cusped traceried windows appear in the nave and transepts, with buttresses defining bays. The transept gables feature large round windows with geometric tracery.

The Sunday School building is attached to the church chancel and has a gable over a 4-light mullioned-and-transomed window beneath a cinquefoil window with plate tracery and a relieving arch above. Double-boarded doors are positioned on the right. An adjacent hall to the right has four 2-light mullioned windows beneath a hipped roof.

The interior contains a panelled west gallery with an inserted glazed screen below. An inserted boarded ceiling with high coving, corbelled trusses, intermediate plaster panels and thin wood ribs covers the space. Windows have pointed chamfered rere-arches, and a boarded dado runs around the interior.

Fittings include Gothic woodwork: a Communion rail on a wrought-iron balustrade, a richly decorated reading desk with shafts and panels, and an organ positioned behind the reading desk. Incised brass door furniture survives. Some original pews with Gothic ends and boarded backs remain, though most have been removed.

Memorials include a war memorial in the vestibule with names carved on a wood panel. Other monuments feature a panel to Reverend G Brown, born in Barnard Castle in 1835 and died in 1917, who was a missionary, explorer and scientist.

Stained glass in the north transept was created by Abbott & Co. of Leicester and depicts David and Dorcas. The south transept contains a war memorial window. The hall has laminated wood roof trusses.

Alterations began in 1989 and were expected to continue with conversion of the Sunday School room to a flat.

Low walls with chamfered coping and spear-headed railings enclose the street fronts of both parts of the building.