United Methodist Free Church

United Methodist Free Church

The United Methodist Free Church opened in 1903 as a red brick building designed by Liverpool architect Thomas H W Walker in the Edwardian Italianate Baroque style.

The church is built of fair-faced red brick laid in English garden wall-bond, with dark-grey brick plinth courses. Stone ashlar is used extensively for bands, keystones, columns, voussoirs, pediments and door hoods. The roof is clad in Welsh slate with red ridge tiles, and features a copper-capped base of a former ventilator and a copper-covered dome.

The building has a rectangular plan aligned north-west to south-east, with basement schoolrooms beneath. It is double-fronted, with the main entrance facing Salisbury Street and a rear entrance facing Alderson Street, situated adjacent to the north side of Lawrence Road.

The asymmetric west elevation is the main frontage. It features a pediment above a round-arched four-panel leaded stained-glass window, flanked by plain brick pilasters. A projecting ground-floor vestibule is lit by four round-arched windows, positioned between a pedimented porch to the north and a square-plan tower to the south. The tower has an octagonal lantern drum emphasised by ashlar scroll buttresses that alternate between the window openings, surmounted by a copper-clad bell-shaped dome. The main entrance is housed in the tower, accessed by stone steps and comprising a large pair of panelled doors beneath a semi-circular fanlight within a semi-circular ashlar hood supported on scroll brackets.

The north and south side elevations employ pier and panel construction with projecting brick eaves courses. Each side has four wide and one narrow round-arched window illuminating the main church body. The windows contain leaded stained glass panels in frames with slender tracery incorporating Ionic columns, with ashlar cills and aprons. Basement schoolrooms are lit by paired windows with flat ashlar lintels. A foundation stone set in the south elevation records that it was laid by the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, W. Watson Rutherford Esq., on 22 November 1902.

An ashlar porch supported by plain columns and approached by stone steps is set in the re-entrant angle between the main church body and the projecting pedimented end bay of the rear entrance range.

The asymmetric east elevation of the rear entrance range contains an entrance block with plain corner pilasters and two pairs of doors set in a round brick arch beneath a six-light segmental semi-circular fanlight. A colonnade of four round-arched windows below a pedimented gable lights the stairs and corridor to first-floor rooms. The entrance block is flanked to the south by a two-bay range and to the north by a single-bay range with a canted corner, each bay having a window to the ground floor and basement.

The church interior is filled with three rows of timber pews, the central rows featuring staggered offset dividing panels. The north, south and west walls have panelled wainscoting. The east wall contains a recessed organ loft decorated with a moulded architrave and plain engaged columns behind a panelled choir and organ gallery. The organ is housed in a panelled case with a fretwork frieze supported on timber posts and ball finials. The organ keyboard sits in a sunken pit in front of the timber-panelled segmental-plan pulpit, accessed by a timber stair with turned balusters. Behind the pulpit wooden panelling rises to the base of the choir gallery. The plaster ceiling is canted with simple moulded decorative panels set between the bases of four partially exposed roof trusses. Four decorative pendant ceiling roses are positioned along the central axis.

The first-floor office room within the rear entrance block is accessed by a staircase and corridor with parquet timber flooring. The basement schoolrooms have ceilings supported on plain round cast-iron pillars.

Three sweeping stairs over basement light wells, flanked by brick walls terminating in brick gate posts, give access to the two entrances in the west elevation and to a side entrance in the south elevation.