Church of St Thomas is a Grade II listed building in the County Durham local planning authority area, England. First listed on 19 July 1950. A Victorian Church.
Church of St Thomas
- WRENN ID
- lost-sandstone-linden
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- County Durham
- Constituency
- North Durham MP: Luke Akehurst (Lab)
- Country
- England
- Date first listed
- 19 July 1950
- Type
- Church
- Period
- Victorian
- Address
- Church of St Thomas, North Road, Stanley
- OS grid reference
- NZ 161 525
- Coordinates
- 54.86791, -1.74953
- Source
- Historic England listing
Description
The Church of St Thomas is a parish church built in 1840 by G. Jackson. It is constructed from coursed squared sandstone with an ashlar plinth and dressings, topped with a Welsh slate roof featuring stone gable copings. The church exhibits an Early English style and consists of a nave with a south porch, and a chancel that includes a north organ chamber and vestry.
The steeply-gabled porch features a moulded two-centred shafted arch with a recessed chamfered surround leading to boarded double doors. The gable has deep coping with a roll-moulded finial. The nave has lancet windows, mostly arranged in pairs across three bays, which include drip moulds and a sill string. The chancel has three stepped lancets in a lower set-back, and the design continues around chamfered coped buttresses that clasp at the corners, adorned with octagonal spirelets on the east and west corners. The west side of the church has three stepped lancets and a stone angelus cross, with trefoils decorating the peaks of the nave gables.
Inside, the church features painted plaster with ashlar dressings above a boarded dado, a panelled chancel dado, and a reredos. The roof trusses include queen and king posts supported by roll-moulded corbels, while the chancel has collared trusses on similar corbels. The chancel arch is two-centred with a chamfered inner arch on roll-moulded corbels, and richly moulded corbels support the organ arch. There is a pierced panel in the west organ chamber wall and a diagonally-boarded west gallery on cast iron columns. The east window serves as a Second World War memorial designed by George Cooper Abbs.
Notable interior features include an octagonal stone font with a pierced ogee cover, gifted by Dr. A. Thorp of Durham, and a white and black marble monument dedicated to Thomas and Mary Fenwick, who died in 1850 and 1856, featuring an open book and anchor in low relief. A 20th-century addition of a hall is not considered of interest.
Local climate
Church of St Thomas receives an average of 810 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 50% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 99% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 40 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 77% of listed buildings. Of these, 24 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
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- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
- No related consent applications matched
- Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
- Flood risk assessment
- Radon risk assessment
- Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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