Castle Gate Congregational Centre And Attached Railings

A Congregational chapel, later a Congregational centre, was built in 1863 by RC Sutton of Nottingham for the Trustees of the Congregational Church. It was altered in 1983. The building is constructed of red brick with blue and yellow brick and ashlar dressings, and has gabled and hipped slate roofs. It is designed in the Lombardic-Venetian Revival style.

The exterior features a plinth, lintel and impost bands, a bracketed eaves cornice, a pierced balustrade with corner pedestals. It is two storeys high with three bays across and five bays in depth. The central projection has a pedimented gable with bracketed cornices and an arched corbel table, flanked by pilaster buttresses. The main entrance has three arches with a larger central arch flanked by pilasters and containing double doorways separated by a granite shaft. It includes a glazed tympanum with radial lights and a keystone. The side wings have a two-light window on each floor, segment-arched below and round-arched above, with keystones. The upper windows have tracery. Returns to the wings have moulded round-arched doorways with keystones, inset lintels and flanking shafts, above which are traceried two-light windows. The nave has five windows on each side, each with two lights, segment-arched below, and round-arched above, with keystones, the upper windows featuring tracery. A dated panel is present in the pediment.

Inside, the building has a central entrance lobby with wings containing stairs to a gallery. Beyond the lobby is a nave with side aisles and galleries linked by a semicircular return end above the entrance lobby. A floor was inserted into the nave at gallery level, creating offices below and an auditorium above which retains the galleries as seating. The upper arcade has double cast-iron columns and foliage capitals. The ribbed barrel vault features granite wall shafts on corbels, and there is a plaster ceiling with decorative ventilators. The organ loft has a large arched opening and side arches carried on cast-iron columns with foliage capitals. A cast-iron railing extends across the front, supported by a brick plinth and a chamfered coping. The central gate piers are square brick with pyramidal ashlar caps and the bases of cast-iron lamps.