West Park United Reformed Church

West Park United Reformed Church

Congregational church, now United Reformed Church, built 1881–83 to a design by JP Pritchett. The building is constructed of coursed rock-faced stone with ashlar plinth and dressings, with red granite shafts. The roof is of graduated Lakeland slate with stone gable copings. The plan comprises an apsed chancel with schoolrooms in a 2-storey ambulatory, double transepts, an aisled nave, and a north-west tower with south-west porch. A half-octagonal stair turret projects from both tower and porch. The church is designed in a Late 14th-century style with geometric tracery throughout.

The exterior features a west door set within a gabled projection between nook-shafts, with a deep arch and dripmould above. The door itself has an inner rib-moulding resting on crocket capitals of intermediate shafts and is topped by a crocketed gable, with small windows set at either side. Similar treatment is applied to smaller doors in the flanking tower and porch. A tall 5-light window is positioned above the west door. The tower rises in five stages: the second stage has paired cusped lancets; the third has a 2-light window; the fourth contains a clock face; and the fifth displays paired belfry openings with nook-shafts and plate tracery. The ashlar spire above is decorated with four bands of fish-scale pattern, two levels of lucarnes, and tall corner spirelets. The aisles have 2-light windows, whilst the transepts feature 3-light paired windows on two levels, with cusped lights in the lower tier and cusped lights with tracery above. The ambulatory has paired cusped lights on two levels set in long windows serving the school stairs. The ambulatory has a polygonal hipped roof, from which rises the steeply pitched hipped chancel roof, which has cusped tracery in large 2-light gabled lucarnes. Transepts are topped with paired gables, and the nave has a steeply pitched roof. Pent stair turret roofs run against the tower and porch.

The interior ambulatory contains meeting rooms and schoolrooms retaining much original Gothic-style detail. Cast-iron piers have octagonal bases with fluted capitals. A stair balustrade features twisted cast-iron balusters. Six-panelled doors include a pierced kitchen door. A dumb waiter is present, along with chimney-pieces, boarded dado with wall bench, original heating system vents, levers and vanes. The upper central meeting room features a hammer beam roof rising to lucarnes.

The chapel interior displays a 5-light west window behind a fine Renaissance-style organ by Nelson & Co. of Durham. Above the entrance is a high west roll-moulded arch with an inner arch on corbelled shafts. Two tiers of slender cast-iron piers with crocket capitals support galleries along all three sides, with the western gallery positioned over entrance vestibules. Upper arcades rise above these galleries, and the plinths of the upper piers are painted with passion flowers and scrolled names of virtues. A boarded hammer beam roof spans the chapel. Deacons' seats are positioned below a high quality central east pulpit of fine ashlar stone featuring green marble shafts to a blind pierced arcade with much decorative carving in North Italian style. The pulpit showed some subsidence damage at the time of survey. The chapel contains high quality painted glass windows: the west window, dated 1902, spans all five lights and depicts Christ in Glory; in the north transept gallery are windows showing the Sermon on the Mount and Christ's Charge to Peter and John, signed by Atkinson Bros.; the north aisle window by J Eadie Reed is dated 1926. Several 19th-century memorial slabs are also present.