Roman Catholic Church Of St Francis And Monastic Building Attached To Church

The Roman Catholic Church of St Francis, with an attached monastic building, was constructed between 1864 and 1872, designed by Edward Welby Pugin for the Order of St Francis. The church is built of red brick with sandstone and blue brick dressings, featuring a steeply-pitched slate roof. It is in the Late Gothic style, with a nave on a north–south axis, flanked by east and west aisles, a south narthex, and a north chancel with a polygonal apse.

The nave and chancel are a single, tall, narrow vessel. The nave has thirteen bays defined by buttresses with corbel tables, banded detailing, and two-light windows with multifoil heads. The chancel has larger but similarly styled windows, and unusual coupled dormers with multifoils; the apse has three-light traceried windows. The aisles feature buttresses and three or four lancet windows per bay. The south front is elaborately decorated with three flying buttresses that rise to the full height of the nave. These buttresses have polychrome bands, four diminishing stone offsets culminating in gablets and corniced octagonal shafts. A large, stepped-out and canopied Crucifixus is attached to a stepped pedestal from which a banded and pilastered bellcote with a spirelet rises. The bases of the buttresses are incorporated into a four-bay narthex, showcasing two-centred arched moulded stone doorways linked by an impost band and a pierced stone parapet with a pierced gablet. Above the narthex are two tall, elaborately moulded, two-light windows with geometrical tracery and banded extradoses, deeply raked stone sills, and hoodmoulds from which pedestals support canopied statues. The aisles feature short, two-centred moulded stone arches, each containing four small multifoils.

Attached to the east side of the church and returning along the front is a cloister. A three-story range on the north side of the garden has small, widely-spaced, segmental-headed sash windows on the first and second floors, ridge chimneys, and a bellcote at the west gable. The building was unoccupied at the time of the survey.