Seventh Day Adventist Church Adjoining School And Boundary Wall

Seventh Day Adventist Church, adjoining school and boundary wall on Andover Street, Sheffield.

This is a Methodist church, now used as a Seventh Day Adventist church, together with an adjoining school and boundary wall. The church and boundary wall were built in 1865, designed by William Hill of Leeds for the Methodist New Connexion. The school dates from 1862. The building is constructed from rock-faced stone with ashlar dressings, and features steep pitched gabled and hipped slate roofs with coped gables. The architecture is Gothic Revival in style.

The church plan comprises a vestigial chancel, vestries, transepts, a nave with galleries, crypts, a south-west tower, and a north-west porch. The windowless chancel has a hipped roof with a corridor to the north that has a lower pitched hipped roof. The transepts have flanking buttresses and three single lancets with linked hoodmoulds, with a plate traceried round window above. The south crypt has three windows, and there are single windows on each floor to east and west, the upper ones being lancets. The north transept's lower window is covered by the school.

The buttressed nave comprises three bays, each with three double windows on the sides and three double lancets above. The west end has a tall three-light pointed arched window with tracery, flanked by single lancets with linked hoodmoulds, with a crosslet above. Below this is a pointed arched double doorway with central shaft beneath a shallow gable, flanked by small single lancets.

The square south-west tower has three stages with string courses and an octagonal broach spire carrying four steeply hipped lucarnes, a finial and weathercock. The ground stage has a triple lancet to the west with hoodmould and a small light to the south. The second stage has a cusped single lancet on three sides. The tapered bell stage has panelled sides with dentilled heads and a two-light pointed arched bell opening with plate tracery on each face.

The two-storey north-west porch has a hipped roof, with a plain triple lancet to north and west, a chamfered doorway to the north with hoodmould, and a single lancet to the west.

The adjoining school is a single-storey building with brick dressings and a gable stack, featuring a five-window range. The larger central block has a round-arched recess with fanlight containing a twentieth-century door, flanked on either side by a round-arched glazing bar window. Beyond these are lower set-back wings, the left with two casements and the right with a single three-light casement, both twentieth-century insertions.

The interior retains much original work, including a moulded pointed arched opening to the east containing a panelled choir gallery and a Gothic organ case. Below this is a panelled square pulpit with wooden balustraded railing. The nave has galleries on three sides with openwork fronts and canted corners, carried on round cast-iron posts with wooden brackets. The roof is arch-braced with wooden ribs at the crossing. The transepts have glazed wooden screens, each with three windows and a door. At the rear is a late twentieth-century wooden enclosure. The west porch and tower contain stone winder stairs. The interior fittings include panelled softwood benches.

The subsidiary boundary wall adjoining the church was raised in the mid-twentieth century and has stepped chamfered coping. At the rounded north-west corner are a pair of square ashlar gate piers with pyramidal caps and wrought-iron gates. The north and south sides have similar piers with smaller gates.