Rc St Mary Of The Angels With Attached Friary And Arch And Bell Frame And Walls And Railings And Gates

Roman Catholic Church and attached friary built between 1907 and 1910 to the designs of Pugin and Pugin. The church was built at the expense of Miss Amy Elizabeth Rosalie Imrie for the Franciscan order and is designed in the Italian High Renaissance style.

The main church is constructed of brown brick with stone bands and dressings and slate roofs. It comprises a seven-bay nave with aisles, a narthex, a one-bay chancel and apsed sanctuary. The Lady Chapel, side chapels and vestries are treated separately under separate roofs, as are the baptistry and side chapel either side of the central front door. An attached arch of brick leads to the attached friary at the rear of the site. The intended tower was never built above ground floor height; instead the bellframe and bell were set in front of it.

The main three-bay west front facing the street is treated simply in the Italian Renaissance style. Buttresses flank a central circular window set under a gable with a broken cornice line, decorated with cut brick modillions. Below the window are a pair of double doors placed centrally under segmental arched toplights, set within a single round-arched opening dominated by a carved figure of Our Lady flanked by angels. Two-light openings under roundels are set in round-arched openings to either side. Cut brick cornice friezes run along the side walls and apse. The clerestory has segmental-arched windows, the aisles have segmental-arched windows, and the side chapels and vestries have longer lancets.

The church interior features a flat timber ceiling of square panels, heavily moulded in Renaissance style. Round-arched arcades of short marble columns, brought from Italy, line the nave. Smaller shafts of red and green marble are positioned at the east end of the arcade and flank the chancel arch. The sanctuary apse is faced in marble with mosaic decoration above. An organ is positioned at the west end over a screen wall, and the nave contains short pews. The communion rail and sanctuary floor are said to have come from a demolished church in Rome, though they have been added to in matching marbles. The present nave altar, adapted from the pulpit in recent years, is of coloured marbles, possibly of 18th-century origins. The holy water stoups are from a church in Rome. Two doorways leading from the eastern end of the aisles are fitted with 17th or 18th-century carved stone doorcases and panelled timber doors, believed to have come from a Roman palazzo. The High Altar is 16th-century and is believed to have come from the Cathedral of San Pietro in Bologna. The altarpiece is a copy of a Perugino from the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Bologna, but with the figures of St Francis, St Anthony, St Elizabeth and St Clare added below, in accordance with Miss Imrie's instructions. The altar to St Francis came from the same demolished church in Rome as the communion rail and sanctuary floor and dates to about 1750. The Lady Chapel altar is 18th-century and is said to have come from the Naples area. The statue of the Virgin was commissioned from Zaccagnini, a 20th-century Roman sculptor. The altar of St Anthony is said to have come from Santa Maria del Priorate, an 18th-century church belonging to the Knights of Malta at the foot of the Aventine Hill in Rome. The Stations of the Cross are copies of those by Tiepolo in the church of the Friars in Venice, commissioned by Miss Imrie.

The six-bay attached friary, now used for student accommodation, is three storeys tall with paired windows on the ground floor and segmental-arched windows above, with a high parapet over a cornice of cut-brick modillions. The interior features round arches to the hallway and simple cornices. An open bell frame with hanging bell is set by a fragment of bell-tower under a pyramidal roof. A round-arched opening leads to the former friary. Low brick walls with iron railings and gates surround the scheme.

Miss Imrie, born Pollard, was adopted by and took the name of her uncle William Imrie of the White Star Shipping Line, one of Liverpool's leading companies. She became a Roman Catholic and devoted herself to St Francis and St Clare, eventually becoming a Poor Clare and serving most of her life as Abbess of a convent at Sclerder in Cornwall. She had clear ideas about how her church should look and determined that it should be modelled on the great Franciscan church of Santa Maria d'Ara Coeli in Rome. She wished for something different from the ordinary run of Gothic churches, which she found rather commonplace, intending to give the people of Liverpool, who could not travel abroad, some idea of what the churches of Rome are like. The church is thus very different from the Gothic style normally associated with the work of Pugin and Pugin. It includes marble columns and facings brought from Italy and many Italian altarpieces, works of art and other fixtures. The church is an exceptionally careful example of an Italian Renaissance revival church with fine fittings, built at great expense and with an extraordinary single-mindedness of purpose.