Park Road Methodist Church With School, Walls And Gates Attached

The Park Road Methodist Church, with its attached school, walls, and gates, was built in 1887 by J Eltringham for the New Connection movement. The church is constructed of rock-faced stone with ashlar dressings, featuring a Welsh slate roof with stone gable copings, a terracotta ridge, and a stone spire. It is built in the Decorated style, characterised by cusped geometric tracery.

The church comprises an aisled nave with transepts and a southwest tower; a southeast school block; the ritual east face the geographical south. The exterior features 3-light transept and 2-light aisle windows on a sill string, with a stepped 4-light transept window under the gable and traceried 2-light aisle gallery windows also on the sill string, all with dripmoulds. The gabled west entrance has steps leading to paired boarded doors with a roundel in the soffit of a high pointed moulded arch. A high 5-light window rises behind the entrance, culminating in a gabled feature. A spirelet sits on the left of the gable. The four-stage tower to the right has paired windows on the first stage, a moulded arch to the door on the return side, 6-foil roundels on the second stage, paired lancets on the third, and high louvred belfry openings under a crocketed dripmould in the fourth stage. Buttresses, gabled in the lower stages, rise to polygonal pinnacles with spirelets. A high octagonal stone spire completes the tower. The school block has a gabled arched doorway with elaborate hinges, a high 4-light window above, a buttressed gable, a high ridge ventilator with swept eaves. Dwarf walls with chamfered coping link piers in front of the tower with the school; the piers have roll-moulded sloping copings. Wrought-iron gates feature spiral motifs.

The church interior includes galleries on three sides supported by cast-iron quatrefoil piers with ringed shafts, and a hammerbeam roof with a boarded coving. High-quality, mostly original furnishings remain, including roll-moulded pews with painted numbers and brass umbrella rails, and a gothic organ case. Stained glass windows of high quality are present, with examples by Powell Bros. Leeds, Atkinson Bros. Newcastle, Heaton, Butler and Bayne, and also by Atkinson Bros. and Wailes and Strang Artists Newcastle.