Christ Church Baptist Church, attached schoolrooms, and Church Hall

Christ Church Baptist Church, attached schoolrooms, and Church Hall

A Baptist church in Decorated style with lavish detailing, built in 1877 by George Ingall of Birmingham (active 1861–1910) for George Frederick Muntz Junior of Umberslade Hall, as an estate church. Vestries and schoolrooms were added to the east end in 1892. A church hall to the north, formerly a temporary timber church, is also included.

Materials and Construction

The building is constructed of blue lias Wilmcote stone with Bath stone dressings and Welsh slate roofs. The floors are laid in Broseley tile throughout.

Plan and Exterior

The church comprises a four-bay nave with a north porch, a south-west tower incorporating a further porch, shallow north and south transepts, and an apsidal east end. A rectangular block housing vestries and a Sunday schoolroom extends from the eastern end.

The building rises as a high single storey with steeply pitched hipped roofs and buttresses with offsets. A three-stage tower dominates the composition. Pinnacles with finials crown the ends of the nave and transepts. The gabled north porch, at the western end of the church, contains a plank door set in a roll-moulded, chamfered surround.

The nave is lit by lancet windows with Geometric-type tracery. The west end features an arcade of four lancets, above which sits a four-light Geometric-type window. The gabled transepts each display an arcade of three lancets with rose windows above. The polygonal apse has similar lancets with Geometric-type windows.

The tower features diagonal buttresses with offsets running to full height, each surmounted by a pinnacle except at the north-east angle, where an embattled octagonal stair turret stands instead. The western side is pierced by a plank door with a stilted arch, set within an ornamented gabled porch with two orders of moulding and slender colonettes. The second stage has trefoil windows and a decorated band. The third stage displays clock faces to two sides, pairs of lancet belfry windows beneath a continuous hoodmould, and a pierced quatrefoil parapet. The spire is adorned with gabled lucarnes.

Interior

The interior features plastered walls and a boarded ceiling. The wide, lofty aisleless nave has floors tiled in polychrome Broseley tiles. At the eastern end, a polygonal apse opens to the four-bay nave via a broad, moulded open arch. The nave has an open timber roof with arch-braces carried down to rest on carved corbels positioned low on the walls. Geometrical stained glass fills the rose windows in the transepts; the other windows contain obscured glass with green marginal glazing.

Original late-nineteenth-century furnishings remain intact throughout. Bench pews with shaped ends and scrolls line the nave. Attached to some are decorative gas lamp standards with barley-twist columns and arms with foliate elements, possibly made from Muntz metal.

At the east end stands the central pulpit, a large rostrum with twin staircases rising on either side of the pulpit desk. Behind the desk, the preacher's seat is set within a Gothic aedicule. Between the pulpit and the communion table lies the sunken baptistery, of unusual and elaborate form: an open rectangular pool lined in marble with three steps to the bottom, surrounded on three sides by a balustrade of squat yellow marble columns with carved foliate capitals and a coped marble rail.

A door at the east end provides access to the later extension, which houses vestries, a WC, and a schoolroom. The schoolroom features an ingenious partition that rolls up to the ceiling when not in use. The walls are clad in matchboarding, and windows are paired or triple lancets with cusping and coloured margin glazing. The doors are panelled, with chamfered and stopped margins to the fields.

Fixtures and Fittings

The south transept houses a late-nineteenth-century organ built by Bishop and Son. The tower contains a clock by Gillet and Bland and eight carillon bells, which originally played seven different tunes. A brass memorial plaque to G F Muntz and his wife Matilda is mounted in the north transept.

Subsidiary Features

To the north of the church stands a timber church, gabled and clad in weatherboarding, built as a temporary church by G F Muntz prior to the construction of the present church. Subsequently used as a school well into the second half of the twentieth century, the building is now a hall.