Church Of St John The Evangelist

The Church of St John the Evangelist is an early Victorian Gothic Revival church built between 1847 and 1849 to the designs of John Middleton, with vestries added in 1900 by W S Hicks. It was constructed to serve the expanding population of railway workers in this area of Darlington.

The church is built of sandstone ashlar with slate roofs. It comprises a nave, chancel, north and south aisles, west tower, south porch, and northeast vestries.

This is a well-proportioned church executed in a severe Early English style. The chancel has clasping buttresses with corner shafts featuring bell capitals and a moulded wall-plate above a stone band, which in turn runs above an Early English-style corbel course. The roof is steeply pitched. A trefoil sits high in the gable, and the east window is a graded triple lancet with a hoodmould. The south side is buttressed and has a shoulder-headed doorway.

The five-bay nave and lean-to aisles also have clasping corner buttresses. The aisles feature a moulded wall-plate and plain stone band over a corbel course matching that on the chancel. Buttresses separate the bays, each containing a single lancet window. A clerestory is formed of narrow lancet slits. The south porch is gabled with a richly moulded outer doorway featuring shafts and stiff-leaf capitals, fitted with a 19th-century two-leaf door with decorated strap hinges.

At the west end stands a tall five-stage tower with a projecting southeast stair turret to the lowest stage. The tower has large set-back buttresses and lancet windows in the lowest stages. The penultimate stage displays blind arcading and slit windows, while the belfry stage has richly moulded belfry windows with shaft rings, recessed below a corbel cornice to the parapet which itself has a cornice. The tower's visually abrupt termination results from the intended broach spire never being built. The west doorway is moulded with triple shafts in a shallow gabled projection with blind trefoils on either side of the gable, and the 19th-century two-leaf door has decorative hinges.

The northeast vestry has lancet windows and a flat roof (reduced from an original gable) and a stack with a stone shaft. A 20th-century brick vestry has been built to the rear, west of the original.

The interior walls are plastered and whitened. The nave is very tall under an extremely steeply pitched roof. The chancel arch takes up almost the full width of the nave and has clustered shafts with bell capitals. Blind trefoils decorate the wall above the chancel arch. The tower arch is very tall. Between the nave and aisles are five-bay arcades with double-chamfered arches on quatrefoil piers with fillets to the shafts and bell capitals.

Over the nave is a substantial wind-braced roof with main and intermediate trusses, the main ones being arch-braced with curved queen struts above the collar. Stone wall-shafts to the main trusses rise from a string-course at clerestory sill level. The chancel has a most unusual roof with exceptionally long scissor braces and collars, ashlar pieces and a moulded wall-plate, ceiled with horizontal boards behind the trusses. The aisle roofs are supported on moulded stone corbels with diagonal braces between the rafters and the outer walls of the arcades.

The triple lancet east window has internal mouldings on detached shafts with shaft-rings. Below the sill of the east window the wall is decorated with blind Early English-style arcading with small trefoils on the spandrels. The chancel is laid with Minton's encaustic tiles, the sanctuary having tiles with the symbols of the Evangelists.

The 19th-century fixtures and fittings are largely complete. The choir stalls have poppyhead bench ends. There is a good polygonal stone pulpit decorated with niches flanked by polished marble shafts with white marble figures in the niches. It has a cornice decorated with stiff-leaf foliage and a circular stem with polished marble shafts and brass barley sugar standards to the handrail to the steps. The font is polygonal with a bowl and stem in one and has Early English arcading round it. The 19th-century benches have shouldered ends and panels with blind flamboyant tracery. The nave has a timber dado of 1932.

The stained glass includes a high-quality east window depicting the Ascension. There is an unusual First World War memorial, a small Arts and Crafts triptych with a beaten metal image of a knight in the centre as the upright of a red enamel St George's cross with brass panels inscribed with names, to the wings.

The churchyard has 19th-century cast-iron railings, gates, and stone gate piers.

The church was built to accommodate the expansion of population due to the arrival of railway workers for the York and Newcastle Railway Company in this area. Initially a warehouse was used for Sunday services, and in July 1845 a new ecclesiastical district was created. George Hudson, 'the Railway King', was adamant that the new church should be both conspicuous and attractive. Subscriptions were invited. The foundation stone was laid on 10 September 1847 and the building was estimated to cost £3,200. Progress was slow and it was only completed in 1849, with the official opening taking place in January 1850. The church had some 620 seats of which over 380 were free. The final cost was £4,000.

The architect, John Middleton (1820-85), was born in York where he became the pupil of James Pigott Pritchett. He began practice in Darlington in 1843, presumably attracted by the opportunities presented by the expansion of this railway town. By 1859 he moved to Cheltenham where he had accepted a commission to design St Mark's church. He subsequently developed a very successful career in the area as a High Victorian Gothic architect.

St John's is a fine building and marks the start of a distinguished church-building career by Middleton. The proportions of the building and the Early English detail is handled with assurance and the building has a strong architectural presence in its neighbourhood. It represents a marked advance in architectural sophistication for church building since the 1830s when Early English-style churches were so often very routine and poor in detail. It is thus a reflection of the fact that Middleton, whose first church this was, had absorbed the messages from Pugin and the ecclesiologists about how churches should be built. Sadly the spire was never built.