Church Of St Ann With Lych Gate And Churchyard Wall

Church of St Ann with Lych Gate and Churchyard Wall, Rainhill

This is a parish church built between 1837 and 1843 by Edward Welch, a Liverpool architect, and enlarged in 1868–69 by G. H. Ridsdale. The building is constructed mainly of hammer-dressed red sandstone with freestone dressings, and some coursed rubble sandstone (probably intended to be rendered), with a slate roof.

The church comprises a nave and chancel under a single roof, a south transept with south aisle, a north aisle, a west tower, and south-west vestries. The design mixes architectural styles: the west end and tower are neo-Norman, while the remainder is in the free Perpendicular style.

The west tower is three stages tall, with shallow angle buttresses on the lower two stages. The west doorway has a broad chamfer and displays the date 1837 in its apex. The lower two stages have round-headed windows with hood moulds in the second storey. The upper stage features narrow attached shafts at the angles with scalloped capitals. Two-light belfry openings contain plate-tracery trefoils with hood moulding. The crown has blind arcaded parapets, a central gablet with a clock, and corner pinnacles.

The nave retains triple round-headed gallery windows on either side of the tower, and the south wall of the nave retains round-headed windows, partly obscured by the vestry. The transept has three stepped lights under a quatrefoil window in its gable. The west end of the north aisle is also neo-Norman, with two round-headed windows above a round-headed doorway with continuous moulding. The remainder is later work. The nave and chancel have a clerestorey of four broad windows in the spaces between the aisle roofs and eaves, featuring cusped-triangle tracery. The north aisle has, from west to east, two 3-light windows, then an entrance in a projecting gabled bay with segmental-pointed double doors under a square label, two 2-light square-headed windows (the easternmost in a set-back bay), and a 3-light east window. The south aisle follows a similar arrangement with 2-light square-headed windows, the easternmost set back, and a 2-light east window. The chancel has a 7-light east window with a transom set low above blind panelling.

The interior retains the width and height of the 1830s nave, creating a large barn-like space. Most interior details belong to the 1868–69 enlargement and later. The arcades have four bays on the north side and three bays on the south side (incorporating the transept), with octagonal piers and double-chamfer arches. The nave and chancel have a four-bay roof of main and subsidiary trusses. Trusses feature collar beams, queen posts, and arched braces; main trusses rest on corbelled brackets. The two easternmost bays are on corbelled wall shafts with foliage capitals. Clerestorey windows have shallow rere-arches with a central colonnette. In the south transept is a single queen-post roof truss with round-arched braces between the posts, behind which are polygonal rafters. The walls are plastered. The nave and aisles have a raised parquet floor with floorboards below the pews and choir stalls; the chancel has a tiled floor.

The original open-arcaded gallery front is retained, with a dog-leg stair in the nave leading to a very narrow gallery at the west end. The neo-Norman font, probably of the 1830s, is octagonal with a scalloped underside and sunken shafts on the stem. Pews dating to 1869 have panelled ends with moulded square tops. The pulpit, dated 1896, is polygonal with canopied niches. A low Gothic panelled screen separates the nave and chancel. The choir stalls are twentieth-century work, plain with panelled ends and backs. The communion rail has twentieth-century iron uprights. The Gothic panelled reredos spans the width of the chancel and continues as screens on the north and south sides of the sanctuary, featuring cusped ogee arches and pinnacles. Several stained-glass windows are present, the most notable being an impressive Last Supper in the east window (1885). Wall monuments include a tablet with a broken column to William Owen (died 1862) by W. Bennett of Liverpool, and a tablet with a draped urn to May Edwards (died 1844).

A neo-Norman former school of 1848 stands on the west side of the churchyard and is now used as the Parish Centre.

A lych gate of 1915 is positioned at the east corner of the churchyard. It is shallow in depth with low red-sandstone side walls supporting a timber frame with unglazed cusped side lights and trefoils and a red-tiled pitched roof surmounted by a cross finial. Both the timber frame and bargeboards incorporate simple carved decoration. Low timber gates with pierced cusped detailing exist at the north-east end. An attached low sandstone churchyard wall features alternating flat and pyramidal copings.

The church was begun in 1837 by Edward Welch (1806–68), a Liverpool architect. Original plans show a cruciform church with a west gallery; Welch probably added a north aisle after 1843. Welch trained under John Oates of Halifax, as did Joseph Hansom, with whom Welch was in partnership until their bankruptcy in 1834. Welch returned to independent practice in Liverpool from 1837 to 1849, during which period he built Gothic and neo-Norman churches. The church was enlarged and restored in 1868–69 by G. H. Ridsdale, who replaced the north transept and aisle with a new, longer north aisle, and added a south aisle on the east side of the south transept. The chancel was probably also lengthened, and the gallery was taken down. South-west vestries were added in 1961. The graveyard was extended in 1914, with the land and churchyard wall donated by the Roby family (local owners of a brass foundry in Rainhill) in memory of Albert Wallace Roby, his wife, and children, who had died in a train crash in 1912. The lych gate was constructed in 1915 and erected in memory of William Henry Roby.