Long Street Methodist Church Long Street Methodist Sunday School

MIDDLETON LONG STREET SD 80 NE (west side) 2/10 Long Street Methodist Church and Methodist Sunday 19/9/69 School G.V. II* Wesleyan (now Methodist) Chapel, Sunday school, gateway and subsidiary buildings. 1899. By Edgar Wood. Header bond brick, rendered in parts, with stone dressings and graduated stone slate roof. A tightly planned group around a garden courtyard with access to Long Street through arched gateways on the fourth side. Free Gothic style which incorporates Arts and Crafts as well as Art Nouveau details. To the right of the courtyard is the church, the west end facing onto the road with an ashlar plinth, clasping buttresses and coped gable with kneelers and finial which rises in the manner of a keystone from the 5-light west window. The windows have original tracery based on Gothic precedent. Porches to left and right the former with a transomed canted bay window. 6- bay nave and aisles with 3-light aisle windows and paired lancet clerestory windows. A battered buttress separates the nave from the 3-bay chancel which has 2-light windows and a 5-light east window. Cast-iron gates in stone archways give access to the courtyard which is surrounded by 1 and 2- storey buildings with various coped gables, battered buttresses, leaded casement windows, original doors and a canted bay window which rises above eaves level. Interior: brick-faced. Octagonal columns run straight into chamfered nave arcade arches. Alternating hammer-beam and scissor- braced roof trusses. The circular stone pulpit has attached shafts, as in a Romanesque column, which support a frieze of carved rose blooms and leaves. An angel supports the book rest. The font is equally forceful, the bowl standing on a tapering square plinth with a bronze figure by Stirling Lee recessed into the front. The stalls, pews, doors with stained glass panels and 2 Art Nouveau sanctuary chairs and even kneelers were all designed by Wood. Sanctuary panelling, organ, and side chapel furnishings are of later dates. Other original features survive throughout the building including the garden layout in the courtyard which has nevertheless had the flower beds filled in.

Listing NGR: SD8704006201