Church Of St Stephen

Church of St Stephen, St Stephens Street, Rashcliffe

A parish church built in 1864 by Sheffield and Rotherham architects William Blackmoor and John Mitchell-Withers. The building is constructed of coursed, squared local sandstone with a slate roof incorporating bands of lozenge-pattern slates.

The church is planned on a cruciform basis with a south porch, south-east tower, and north-east vestry. It is designed in the early-Decorated style fashionable in the 1860s, characterised by low walls, steeply pitched roofs, and windows with recessed tracery. The five-bay nave features two-light plate-tracery windows on both north and south sides, and a large five-light west window. The south porch has low raked buttresses, an entrance with nook shafts, and simple boarded doors.

The transepts are two bays long, with paired cusped windows in their side walls. The end walls contain large rose windows, with cusped single windows on the south side and a pointed north doorway beneath a tympanum of three blind trefoils. The chancel has a four-light east window and single-light north and south windows.

The three-stage tower is positioned in the angle between the chancel and south transept. It features a south-west turret, set-back buttresses, narrow windows in the middle stage, and two-light belfry openings under steep gables. The tower is crowned by a tall broach spire. The vestry projects to the east and is gabled, with trefoils in the gable and a stack in the north wall.

Internally, only one bay of the nave remains as part of the main body of the church; the remainder has been screened off for parish rooms. The nave and transepts have arched-brace roofs on short corbelled shafts with three tiers of plain windbraces, decorated with twentieth-century stencilling. The narrow, steeply pointed chancel arch has an inner order on shafts. The chancel roof consists of closely-spaced scissor braces. Walls are plastered, with raised floorboards below the pews and a terrazzo floor in the sanctuary.

Nineteenth-century furnishings include some of the nave and transept benches with ends featuring arm rests and backs with diagonal boarding. The wooden communion rail on iron uprights is also likely nineteenth-century. A probable former chancel screen has been relocated to frame the doorway in the nave partition. A chapel screened off in the south transept contains a wooden screen brought from St Matthew, Primrose Hill, London, in 1972, along with a First World War memorial timber reredos. This memorial reredos comprises a central arch framing the window with outer blind arched panels bearing inscriptions, set within a frame with blind tracery in the spandrels and brattishing. The altar, featuring blind arcading with painted Passion symbols in shields, is nineteenth-century. The chancel contains Gothic panelling in the sanctuary with a painted reredos. The font is late twentieth-century, consisting of an orb with detachable lid on a frame of two curved metal sheets. The stained-glass east window dates to the 1860s and is original to the church.