Bowdon Downs Church, Schoolroom And Lecture Hall

This is a Congregational chapel, now a Pentecostal church, originally built in 1847. Transepts and galleries were added in 1868, a lecture hall in 1882, and a porch around 1920. The building is constructed of dressed sandstone with a Westmorland slate roof. It comprises a wide nave with north, south, and west porches, a west gallery, transepts each with a gallery, a schoolroom, and a vestry. The lecture hall and additional rooms extend along Bowdon Road.

The elaborate west porch features a pointed doorway and gable. Above the doorway is a five-light Perpendicular style window with an enriched ogee dripmould, flanked by small, canopied niches for statues, and a coped gable topped with an ornate finial. The nave has six bays, and each bay features a plinth, moulded eaves, a steep roof, buttresses, and a two-light window. A porch is located within the second bay. The transepts, which are as tall as the nave, have a similar design, with two two-light windows on the lower level, a rose window within an enriched arched surround at the higher level, and coped gables with kneelers incorporating grotesque animals. The lecture hall and associated rooms are a single-story building arranged across eight bays, with a picturesque composition including three coped gables, a chimney stack with three octagonal shafts, weathered buttresses, cusped windows, and a tall fleche on the lecture hall roof.

Inside, the west doors feature an iron lattice with a daisy motif. Traceried timber screens divide the spaces. The two-bay transepts contain coupled intermediate columns with foliated capitals and an arch-braced hammer beam roof. A carved frieze was designed for, but rejected by, Queen Victoria; it is positioned behind a central octagonal stone pulpit. A marble statue of Mary and Martha, in memory of Jesse Haworth, dates from 1930. The church has good stained glass throughout, including within the lecture hall.