Church Of St Paul

The Church of St Paul is a parish church dating to 1874, with a westward extension of three bays added in 1891 by Paley and Austin. It was originally designed by Edmund Sharpe. The church is constructed of brick, faced with local gritstone and featuring yellow terracotta detailing, with slate roofs.

The building is arranged with a five-bay aisled nave, a western transept, a hipped tower over the chancel bay, a north vestry, and an eastern apsidal sanctuary. The architectural style is late 12th-century Transitional, incorporating details inspired by Sharpe's studies of Yorkshire Cistercian Abbeys. The west facade features a wheel window above two lancets. A two-storey south porch has an entrance arch composed of three receding semicircular arches, with two round-headed windows above. The nave bays are defined by pilaster buttresses to both the aisle and clerestory. Each aisle bay has two round-headed windows, and each clerestory bay has two roundels, with a carved corbel table above. The square tower rises with two small round-headed windows to the north and south. The bell-chamber stage is distinguished by thin clasping buttresses with nook-shafts and two pointed arch openings to each face, filled with two-light plate tracery. The east and west gables have steep lead roofs, each with a vesica piscis opening. The apse has a half-conical roof divided into three bays by buttresses, with a blind arcade of semicircular arches below a large round-headed window, and a continuous corbel-table gutter.

Internally, the northern third of the western transept is open to the ridge. The terracotta nave arcades have round arches of two orders springing from columns with square scalloped capitals. The nave roof trusses are supported on triple terracotta shafts sitting on corbels within the arcade spandrels. The chancel and sanctuary arches are also of two orders rising from corbelled triple shaft responds. The chancel bay below the tower has a quadripartite plaster rib-vault and blind arcading to dado level on the north and south walls. The apse has a plaster cul-de-four vault, and the windows are set within a continuous wall-arcade. The church contains pews that stretch from arcade to arcade without a central aisle, and a large pink marble font.