Church Of St George

This is an Anglican church built between 1836 and 1838, designed by John Clark, with an apse added around 1890 by Henry Walker. The church is constructed of ashlar with a slate roof and is in the Gothic Revival style.

The plan includes a nave and aisles of eight bays, a three-stage west tower (the spire was removed in 1962), and an apse with traceried windows and crocketed finials. The church is built on a podium which houses a crypt and burial vaults, accessed via pointed-arch windows (with 20th-century frames) and buttresses.

The west front features a steep flight of stone steps flanked by octagonal piers leading to a walkway over the podium. The tower has diagonal buttresses and a west entrance with an ogee crocketed arch and a three-light plate tracery window above, with a clock at the third stage. Tall lancet windows to the aisles have hoodmoulds. The east end is screened by a wall approximately 3 meters high with octagonal crenellated piers, and incorporates two straight flights of steps: one rising to the walkway over the podium, and the other to a pointed-arch doorway at the northeast corner.

The interior features a Queen-post roof with carved details and Gothic arches. Galleries were removed during refurbishment in 1989. The apse contains a large painted panel by Charles Cope, RA, titled 'All Nations looking unto Christ,’ and a memorial window in the south wall, containing original stained glass in medallions and dedicated to Christopher Beckett, one of the church’s principal founders. The undercroft has shallow segmental vaults which retain original divisions for stone coffin shelves (removed around 1962); chamfered round-arched openings provide access from the burial vault area to the west end of the crypt.

The church was built on part of Christopher Beckett’s Mount Pleasant estate, as part of the development of the Clarendon Road-Woodhouse Square area by the Atkinsons between approximately 1825 and 1840, for which John Clark also designed several houses in the Greek style. The undercroft originally contained 700 stone recesses for coffins; there was no separate graveyard, and 300 were occupied in 1962. The undercroft was altered in the 1930s by the vicar, Don Robins (d.1948), who established a refuge and advice centre for unemployed men.