Church Of St Margaret

Church of St Margaret

This is a parish church built in 1878-79 by the renowned architect Richard Norman Shaw, at a cost of £12,809 including furnishings. It was constructed to serve visitors to the nearby Hydro at Ilkley, a therapeutic centre that had been operating since the 1840s. The church retains late 19th and early 20th century fittings of exceptional quality.

The building is constructed in snecked dressed sandstone with freestone dressings and lead roofs. It adopts a free-Perpendicular style and makes ingenious use of the sloping ground on its north and east sides to create a monumental character, a feature characteristic of Shaw's church designs elsewhere.

The plan comprises an aisled nave with a north-west porch, chancel with a north chapel and south organ chamber built over vestries and a boiler room. The four-bay aisles are buttressed and feature pairs of 3-light windows beneath straight-headed pairs of 3-light clerestorey windows. The nave has a 10-light west window, with 3-light west windows serving the aisles. The storeyed porch has diagonal buttresses, an entrance with polygonal responds and a hollow-moulded arch, hood mould with heraldic stops, and a small square-headed 2-light window above. A polygonal stair turret occupies the south-west angle. The inner porch doorway has a continuous moulding and linenfold-panel doors. Between the nave and chancel stands a gabled bellcote with cusped openings for 2 bells. The chancel east end is impressively tall with massive angle buttresses and a plain coped parapet. It contains a 9-light east window set high above a narrow vestry door, two 2-light transomed north and south windows, and tall blind arches which on the north side incorporate 3-light vestry windows. The north chapel and south organ chamber project like transepts, each with stone stacks in their east walls. The north chapel has a 5-light north window; the organ chamber features a pair of high-set 2-light south windows and a straight-headed 5-light vestry east window where the central light is taller. A link at the east end of the south aisle connects to a parish centre of early 21st-century date.

The interior is wide and spacious. Four-bay nave arcades display Decorated rather than Perpendicular characteristics, with wide double-chamfered arches on octagonal piers. The chancel arch is similar but incorporates hollow mouldings on polygonal responds. The eight-bay nave roof comprises corbelled arched braces below tie beams; the chancel roof is similar but with intermediate trusses without arched braces. The east window has a shafted rere-arch. Sedilia are placed beneath a segmental pointed arch, beside which a piscina sits under a square hood mould. The walls are of exposed stone, while the floor is laid with plain tiles, with parquet flooring below nave and aisle seating and floorboards beneath the choir stalls.

A raised polygonal baptistery beneath the west window is enclosed by a low arcaded wooden screen below a canopy with pendants and brattishing, surmounted by carved angels. The octagonal font, standing on a buttressed stem, was installed in 1911 following Shaw's design though not entirely faithful in execution. Simple benches with open backs are retained in the aisles. The monumental freestone pulpit, dated 1881, features blind Gothic tracery below a frieze of angels.

Screens span the east end of the nave and aisles, created by James Elwell of Beverley (d 1926), incorporating iron grilles, tracery to main lights and coving. The nave screen is surmounted by a rood of 1928 by Faith Craft Studios. Outer screens have paired gates with ramped top rails. Stations of the Cross in the north, west and south walls comprise brightly painted square plaster panels in wooden frames, designed by Faith Craft Studios.

Early 20th-century choir stalls feature ends with buttresses and pinnacles, and open Gothic frontals. The wooden communion rail is by Thompson of Kilburn. The reredos is an opulent wooden triptych with double-hinged outer panels allowing closure during Lent. Erected in 1925 at a cost of £1,350, it was designed by J. Harold Gibbons of Westminster, carved by Boulton & Sons of Cheltenham, and painted and gilded by Gugleilus Tosi. It is decorated with abundant foliage, and its central panel displays carved figures of Christ and Apostles beneath a Gothic canopy.

The church contains numerous stained glass windows of late 19th and early 20th-century date, including six by Powell & Sons from 1897, 1902, 1906, 1907 and 1919. The Creation and Revelation west and east windows date to 1897, were designed by Shaw, and were installed at a cost of £1,150. Additional windows are by Clayton & Bell (1882), Morris & Co (1894, 1902), Shrigley & Hunt, Martin Travers (1937), and a panel by H.J. Salisbury of circa 1911 brought from Dunstable in 2004.

In the churchyard stands a 1914-18 war memorial in the form of a medieval-type churchyard cross. A parish room was added in the early 21st century.

Shaw (1831-1912) had been principal assistant in the office of G.E. Street before establishing his own practice. Although best known for developing a style based on English vernacular buildings used for numerous town and country houses, he also designed several Gothic churches of considerable artistry. St Margaret's is among those calculated to appear impressive on a hillside setting, comparable to examples at Richards Castle, Shropshire. As architectural historian Andrew Saint observed, "Through not the finest of Shaw's church-building achievements, it is the most reflective, and the prototype of his major churches afterwards." Some fittings, such as the reredos, screens and font, are later additions, though the baptistery was based on Shaw's design.