Church Of St Andrew And Attached Former Schoolroom

Church of St Andrew and Attached Former Schoolroom

Parish church built between 1860 and 1862 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, a leading church architect of the Victorian era. The building stands on Jarrom Street in Leicester.

The church is constructed in red brick with blue-brick and freestone patterning, with graded slate roofs. Internally, buff brick features red and black brick patterning to window reveals and arches.

The building follows a cruciform plan with a lower apsidal chancel and south porch. The exterior displays Early-English Gothic style with lofty proportions, steep roofs on a corbel table, and strong, simplified Gothic detail. The five-bay nave contains two-light windows comprising two lancets under a roundel and relieving arch to create the impression of plate tracery. Above impost level runs blue-brick diapering. A gabled bellcote sits over the east end of the nave, with arch openings for three bells arranged in two tiers.

The south porch features an entrance with shafts and blue-brick hood mould, while the inner doorway has a roll-moulded arch. Both doorways are topped with blue-brick crosses. Side walls have pairs of unglazed lancets. The grander west doorway has three orders of nook shafts and a stepped arch. The west window comprises two two-light plate-tracery windows beneath a cusped circle, all contained within a shallow arched recess flanked by buttresses, with lancets on their outer sides. The transepts have three lancets below large round windows with smaller round tracery lights, with additional lancets in the side walls. The chancel receives richer treatment with blind arcading featuring freestone shafts on a high plinth, where alternate arches frame lancet windows.

The schoolroom on the north side of the nave extends four bays and hips to the east end. It contains two four-light transomed windows under gables, a four-light mullioned window, and an entrance on the left side within a link to a modern hall (not listed), beneath a roof dormer.

Internally, the nave is faced in white brick with polychrome dressings and banding. It features a powerful six-bay arched-brace roof rising from short wall shafts, with each truss constructed of two parallel braces joined by cross-braced framing. The chancel arch has an inner order on corbels, while the chancel itself contains a common-rafter roof. Floors comprise red and black tiles, with raised floorboards beneath the pews.

The round stone font dates to 1862, as marked on a plaque, and is topped with a buttressed wooden canopy. A marble polygonal pulpit was added in 1892 and is notably ornate, featuring marble shafts and detached octagonal shafts to the stem, with steps fitted with ornate iron and brass balustrade. Nave benches are plain, with notional arm rests. An impressive alabaster altar, inlaid with figures of Christ and angels with censers, was installed in the 1890s. The chancel glass is possibly by Clayton & Bell.

The former schoolroom, now serving as parish offices, forms part of the listed building. The Vicarage, also designed by Scott, is separately listed and stands north-west of the church.

The church is notable as one of only four churches by Scott to employ extensive brick polychromy; the others are at Crewe Green in Cheshire (1857–58), Ottershaw in Surrey (1863), and St Andrew in Uxbridge, Greater London (1865). This use of polychromy demonstrates how Scott's work was influenced at that time by the churches of William Butterfield. Scott began practice in the mid-1830s and became the most successful church architect of his day, his churches generally deriving their character from late 13th- or early 14th-century architecture rather than the more florid High-Victorian styles popular from the late 1850s to the 1870s.