Church of St Michael

The Church of St Michael is a Bishopwearmouth parish church with a complex history spanning several centuries. The medieval chancel was largely reconstructed, while the tower dates to around 1807. John Dobson designed the transepts in 1849-50, and the nave was rebuilt between 1933 and 1935 by W.D. Caröe, incorporating double aisles. In 1981, Ian Curry partitioned the outer aisles and inserted floors to create a community centre. The church is constructed of coursed squared sandstone with ashlar dressings, with ashlar aisles and porches and a Welsh slate roof featuring stone gable copings.

The church’s design incorporates Decorated style elements for the transepts and chancel, and Perpendicular detailing for the aisles and porches. The transepts feature geometric tracery in their five-light east and four-light windows, with roundels in the gable peaks. The buttressed aisles have three-light windows, and low porches with boarded doors recessed into elliptical arches. The west end has a wide, buttressed porch with two doors in elliptical arches, flanked by tall two-light windows under a ramped pent roof. The west ends of the aisles above have central projecting canopied niches rising through stepped parapets to pinnacles. The two-stage tower above the porch has intersecting tracery below and Perpendicular tracery in pointed-arched, louvred belfry openings, all beneath a stepped battlemented parapet.

Inside, the church features ashlar walls and plastered aisles with ashlar dressings. The three-bay nave has high, elliptical arcades with polygonal piers; the chancel has a wood barrel vault roof, and the nave a roof with arch-braced trusses. There is a piscina and sedilia in a late 13th-century style. The transepts contain high-quality wood galleries set in the east bays of the nave arcade, and a similar wood screen has been transferred to the west end. The interior also includes a high-quality 20th-century carved wood organ case and pulpit incorporating a sounding board. A medieval font bowl is present, along with a 17th-century font featuring a fluted bowl on a turned pedestal rising from acanthus leaves, and an elaborate 19th-century font.

The church contains several memorials, including two medieval grave-covers in the west porch – one with a stepped base to the incised cross, and the other with a foliate cross head. An eroded medieval effigy in the south transept is said to represent Thomas Middleton of Silksworth. Numerous 18th- and 19th-century memorials are present, such as a brass in the chancel dedicated to William Cockin (d.1889), created by Singer and Sons, and a memorial to John Scott (d.1853) by Lewis and Son. The south transept contains a high relief depicting a grieving woman, commemorating Stephen Pemberton (d.1831) and signed David Dunbar. A plaque in the west porch acknowledges the contribution of Sir John Priestman to the 1933-35 restorations, and a marble memorial remembers Thomas Wilson, a proprietor of the Glass Manufactory at Ayres Quay, who died in 1776. The east window is a 1950 design by D.M. Grant.