Former Church Of St Andrew

FORMER CHURCH OF ST ANDREW, Leeds Road

A former parish church built in 1870 by W.H. Crossland, a Leeds architect (1823-1909) who trained under Sir George Gilbert Scott and designed several Yorkshire churches in the Decorated style, as well as important secular buildings including Rochdale Town Hall and Holloway College at Egham, Surrey.

The church is constructed of coursed sandstone with graded-slate roofs. The plan comprises an aisled nave with a south porch, south transept and west choir vestry, a chancel with south vestry and south transeptal organ chamber, and a north chapel continuous with the nave aisle.

The exterior displays Decorated style architecture throughout. The nave aisles contain 3-light windows, while the clerestorey features 2 pairs of lozenge windows with curved sides and quatrefoil tracery. The original tracery of the west window has been removed, above which corbels remain from a former bellcote. Below the west window sits an added choir vestry, flanked by 2-light aisle west windows. The porch has a steeply pitched roof with an entrance arch of 2 orders of shafts with foliage capitals, topped by a sculpted figure of Christ in a mandorla surrounded by vines in low relief. The buttressed south transept houses the organ and features a rose window above a panelled frieze incorporating relief-carved shields with emblems of the Evangelists and other symbols. Diagonal buttresses support the chancel, vestry and chapel at the east end. The chancel contains a 5-light east window and the north chapel a 3-light east window. A stone chimney stack rises from the chancel eaves above the south vestry.

The interior (last recorded in 2003, as the building was not accessible in June 2009) contains three-bay nave arcades of round piers and foliage capitals supporting double-chamfered arches; the first bay is notably narrow. The chancel arch is similar, with foliage capitals on corbelled shafts. The nave has a hammerbeam roof with tracery above the hammerbeams and plastered panels. The chancel features a closed polygonal roof with moulded ribs and bosses. Walls are plastered throughout, with plain tiles in the nave and encaustic patterned tiles in the chancel.

Notable fixtures include a font with hemispherical bowl on a stem with attached shafts and roundel carvings; nave benches with fielded-panel backs and shouldered ends; a polygonal stone pulpit with lavish decoration; simpler benches in the north chapel; some choir stalls on the chancel's south side with tracery frieze along the backs and shouldered ends; an early 20th-century wooden reredos and altar table forming a pair, with blind tracery panels and central nodding-ogee canopy; and a wooden First World War memorial in the north aisle consisting of 2 panels with a roll call. Stained glass includes work probably by Ward & Hughes in the east window, work by Kempe or Bacon in a south-aisle west window, and work by Heaton, Butler & Bayne in another south-aisle window. Some fixtures had been removed by 2003.

A west choir vestry was added in 1914 by William Cooper, architect of Huddersfield. The church was declared redundant in 1975 and subsequently used by a local Roman Catholic congregation until around 2001, after which its future became uncertain.