Church Of St Andrew

Church of St Andrew

Parish church of 1906–7, designed by Edward S Prior with A Randall Wells as site architect. The principal benefactor was John Priestman. The church incorporates inscriptions by Eric Gill, interior painted plaster by MacDonald Gill following Prior's design, further Eric Gill inscriptions, and stained glass by HA Payne.

The structure is built of Marsden magnesian limestone rubble with reinforced concrete arches, purlins, and tracery. The roof is laid with stone slates. The plan comprises a sanctuary, an east tower over a one-bay chancel, a choir with a north vestry and south morning chapel in transepts, a four-bay nave with a west baptistry, north and south porches, and a southeast morning chapel porch.

The architectural style is Free Gothic. The exterior displays innovative window tracery with triangular-headed lights in Saxon style; some windows have transoms while others feature horizontal lattice tracery, with polygonal unmoulded mullions throughout. The sanctuary and transepts have canted corners and hexagonal buttresses to the tower. The nave buttresses are shallow, rising from the plane of the wall below the window sills and coped below the eaves. Behind the sloped coping of the nave walls, internal piers rise through the roof as transverse buttresses with gabled coping.

The sanctuary has a high gabled roof with canted corners and contains a five-light window whose masonry radiates from the window head. The tower is three stages tall: the first stage has tall proportions with three-light north and south windows; the second stage features small rectangular lights; the upper stage displays five-light windows with elliptical heads recessed beneath triple chamfers springing from angle buttresses. Stepped parapets to the tower are flanked by pierced buttress parapets. A round northwest stair turret with single triangular-headed lights and a gabled roof with small quadrant arch leans against the tower. The north gable of the vestry has similar lights. The morning chapel has a large five-light pointed-arched window with rectilinear intersecting tracery and matching transoms; double mullions and transoms appear in the circular east light, and the chapel has canted corners. The nave walls rise in two planes: the lower part is stone-coped to form sills to the windows, which are recessed between shallow coped buttresses in the same plane as the lower wall. The monopitch roofs of the shallow porches are continuous with window-sill coping, with the southwest porch projecting from the baptistry.

The interior is of rubble construction except for painted plaster in the chancel and sanctuary. The chancel tapers to the sanctuary beneath a painted domed vault under the tower. The choir has diagonal arches across the transepts which widen the opening to the nave. Triangular-section piers between windows rest on flat, roughly-tooled soffits extending from the walls to pairs of slender hexagonal ashlar columns, forming low narrow aisles. From these principal piers spring window rerearches at a high level in one direction, and massive cruck-shaped nave arches rise from the base in the other direction. These piers extend through the roof as transverse buttresses noted above. Large concrete purlins carry the oak rafters.

The baptistry contains a stone bowl font by A.R. Wells with carved hexagonal piers, a wood cover by Thompson of Kilburn, and sits beneath the centre of the arch formed by the wider west piers, against which the north and south porches lean. The sanctuary and choir are panelled, the nave has a high boarded dado, and the furnishings and fittings throughout are of the highest quality in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The east window contains stained glass depicting the Ascension by Payne; the south morning chapel window shows Christ the Comforter, also by Payne. The east morning chapel window displays signs of the Evangelists made by Thompson and Snee, Gateshead, and is said to have been designed by Burne-Jones. Other windows contain clear glass of special textural and brilliance qualities; some windows were in poor condition at the time of survey, though restoration work was expected to commence.

The building represents a rare artistic achievement, combining vernacular and modern materials in an entirely new approach to church architecture.