Former Edgworth Methodist Church including boundary wall, gates and piers

Former Edgworth Methodist Church

A Methodist church built in 1863 by architect John Walsh Best, designed in the Early English Gothic style.

The building is constructed of buff sandstone and gritstone with ashlar quoins and dressings, and topped with blue Welsh slate. The church sits prominently on a hillside and features a polygonal apse to a wide, aisle-less nave, with a north-west tower and north-east vestry.

The walls are of narrow-coursed, rock-faced stone. The roof is of blue slate with polygonal bands. The chancel is a shallow polygonal apse with a stepped three-lancet window. To the right, the vestry breaks forward with a small lavatory clasping the east wall.

The north and south walls comprise four bays plus a narthex, with stepped buttresses between them. These are decorated with shaped gutter corbels of several different designs and a stepped string course. Each window is a stepped triple lancet set below a pointed arch with drip-mould and stops featuring a mix of carved heads, fruit and foliage. The vestry has a similar five-light window with straight-pointed heads.

The tower rises in three stages with stepped, sloping, set-back buttresses and plate-tracery windows. The west doorway features a stopped hoodmould and extravagant hinges. It is approached by four steps and flanked by cusped lancets decorated with dogtooth carving. Paired columns with richly carved capitals flank the entrance—one carved with roses, the other with oak and ivy—and between them are carved nesting birds. The doors carry decorative hinges. Above is a stepped triplet of paired lights with slender-column mullions matching the capitals below, and trefoils in the tympana. Gallery-stair windows to either side use similar columns as jambs. The tower is topped with a banded broach spire.

Internally, the apsidal chancel is rib-vaulted with floral bosses and capitals to the columns flanking the windows and granite colonnettes supporting the chancel arch. The east window is by Holiday and depicts Faith, Hope and Love, with a representation of Faith thought to be unique, and grisaille work below with angels above. It is dedicated to James and Alice Barlow by their children. The oak-panelled reredos memorial is inscribed: "TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THE BARLOW FAMILY / WHO FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS HAVE RENDERED / TO THIS CHURCH SUCH FAITHFUL DEVOTED AND GENEROUS SERVICE." The altar rail is original with floral ironwork of Art Nouveau character.

The pulpit is low but ornate with arcading and an exuberant newel finial. The ceiling is boarded above the truss collars. The windows throughout, including the west window now enclosed in the gallery, are attractively and delicately leaded with textured panes of pink, green and yellow glass. The north side retains the highly-coloured former east window depicting scenes of children and dedicated to deceased children of James and Alice Barlow. The south side has a Holiday triple window depicting the good shepherd, the sower and the lost piece of silver, with additional grisaille work.

The boundary wall to Bolton Road is of similar stone construction to the church, with shaped copings and short piers topped with a rail. The entrance features gates and piers.