Chapel Of The Sacred Heart

Chapel of the Sacred Heart, Monks Kirby

A cemetery chapel in French Baroque style, designed between 1877 and 1880 by Thomas Henry Wyatt for the 8th Earl of Denbigh, and built in 1888.

The building is constructed from roughcast rendered brick with limestone dressings, plain clay tile roofs, and a copper-clad spirelet. It is a single-storey structure with a rectangular body and an apsidal east end, a small vestry attached to the north, and relatively steep roofs. The whole sits on a slightly projecting plinth.

The entrance, set in the west end, is protected by a timber canopy porch supported on carved scrolled timber brackets, with elaborately panelled double doors. A central timber bellcote, topped with a spirelet, rises from the roof. Heavy stone buttresses with scrolled tops run along the north and south sides. The south side features two gabled dormers, each containing a two-light timber casement window with carved timber decoration at their heads. The north side has similar windows, together with a large stone mullioned window of three lights, each with foliate carved tops. Much of the leaded glass has been lost.

The interior is relatively simple, with a continuous frieze of text and painted plaster floral decoration running around the body of the chapel. The entrance doors are set under segmental arched tops within a classical timber doorcasing. The apsidal east end contains an impressively decorated half-dome set behind a wide semi-circular arch bearing a gilt inscription. The intrados is decorated with painted and stencilled geometric patterns. The half-dome itself is gilded with a flared mandorla motif at its centre. Below it, the apse is completely decorated with painted and stencilled geometric patterns in predominantly red and pale blue-green on white ground, each element containing alternating inscriptions reading PAX, SPES, RIP and IHS. A classical pink and white marble altar with altar back stands in the apse on a moulded pink marble plinth, the altar back inscribed EGO SUM RESURRECTIO VITA. A carved stoup stands to the right of the altar, with another adjacent to the entrance doorway. The vestry entrance has an elaborate stone doorcase with moulded architrave, an elliptical arched opening, dentil frieze, and scrolled decoration in the spandrels. The vestry displays a stencilled anthemion frieze as cornice, continuing around its rectangular window opening. The roof trusses spring from scrolled corbels and are ceiled above the collars, which feature continuous arched braces and decorative elements forming a keyed segmental arch.

The chapel stands on the western edge of the Newnham Paddox estate, seat of the Earls of Denbigh. The Feilding family has owned the estate since 1433. In the late 16th or early 17th century, they built or rebuilt a large, rambling house, perhaps timber-framed, at a time of rising family fortunes. This culminated in Sir William Feilding's elevation to the peerage as Baron Feilding in 1620 and Earl of Denbigh in 1622. The 5th Earl returned to Newnham Paddox in 1741 and immediately began modernising the house and garden. He was a friend of Lord Cobham and engaged Lancelot "Capability" Brown, who was then designing Cobham's celebrated gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, to work at Newnham Paddox beginning in 1746—one of Brown's earliest commissions. Brown also created an austerely classical house from 1754, set in a typical Brownian landscape where the earlier formal pools and canals became a serpentine lake. The 8th Earl, who succeeded to the title in 1865 and benefited from money from the sale of his wife's estate, had the house largely rebuilt by Thomas Henry Wyatt (1807-1880) in an elaborate French Baroque style. Wyatt had previously worked on a church at Pantasaph in Flintshire for Lord Denbigh, and his designs for Newnham Paddox were executed in 1876-9. Concurrently, Wyatt designed the cemetery chapel for Lord Denbigh, who had converted to Catholicism. The house at Newnham Paddox was demolished in 1952, but the estate and the chapel remain in the ownership of the Earls of Denbigh.