Church Of St Saviour

SE3132NW 714-1/82/178 26/09/63

LEEDS ELLERBY ROAD (South West side) Church of St Saviour

GV I

Anglican church. 1842-45. By John Macduff Derick. Dressed stone with ashlar dressings, Gothic Revival style. PLAN: nave, chancel, north and south aisles, transepts and north porch, on a sloping site with orientation nearer north-south than east-west. EXTERIOR: tall and narrow, with crossing tower with quatrefoil pierced parapet and pinnacles, 5-light windows to both transepts and the west and east ends, 3-light chancel windows, 2-light aisle windows, clerestory. Bellcote over west end has small flying buttresses and crocketed pinnacles. INTERIOR: reputed to contain tall octagonal piers to nave arcades, aisleless chancel, Pusey chapel by GF Bodley, 1890. Reredos by Temple Moore, 1921. STAINED GLASS: the four 5-light windows described by Pevsner as 'of great merit, in the style of the C13 and in glowing colour, nothing yet of Victorian insipidity'; designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and executed by O'Connor to Pusey's directions worked out with Benjamin Webb of the Cambridge Camden Society. The windows of the north end of the north aisle and the north porch are by Morris and Co and were made between 1875 and 1880; single figures of saints, and Fra Angelico. The church was built just after the completion of the rebuilt parish church for Dean Hook and was the centre of a major controversy over church ritual. Dr Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University and a leading member of the Oxford Movement was the leading patron of the living, together with 3 other Tractarians; he financed the building anonymously as the earliest Tractarian parochial experiment outside London. The building is of a high standard of craftsmanship but was not completed: the tall spire, (modelled on St Mary's, Oxford), and pinnacles along the eaves were not built; the corbel tables, crocketed pinnacles and stops to the window hoodmoulds were left uncarved. HISTORICAL NOTE: attacks on the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement in Leeds reached extreme proportions between 1845 and 1851, led by both Anglicans and Non Conformists, St Saviour's Church being considered an 'obnoxious influence'; it was to become a typical and successful ritualist church of the late C19 during the incumbency of John Wylde, 1877-1929. (Pevsner, N: The Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding:

1967-; Fraser, D (Ed): A History of Modern Leeds: 1980-: 263; Thoresby Society Publication: Yates, N: Leeds and the Oxford Movement: 1975-: 27-31).

Listing NGR: SE3129132953