Church Of St Thomas

The Church of St Thomas was completed in 1847 to designs by Benjamin Ferrey in the Early English Gothic style. A large extension was added to the north side in 1989.

The church is built of rusticated red sandstone ashlar with ashlar dressings and tile roofs. The 20th-century extension is rendered and painted.

Plan and Setting

The church follows a simple plan with an aisleless nave and small chancel, a central west tower, and a south porch. The 20th-century extension sits against the north side. The church occupies a large, carefully planned churchyard bordered by low stone walls with square gate piers and mature planting. Set well back within its plot, the church commands a distinctive presence, with the land falling away from the building as a result of deliberate landscaping undertaken before construction.

Exterior

The design is regular, with each bay containing a two-light plate tracery window (alternating trefoils and quatrefoils in the heads) neatly positioned within bays articulated by simple buttresses with set-offs. The walls are topped with a carved corbel table featuring abstract designs. The church's character derives largely from its colour and texture: almost blue tiles cover the steeply pitched roof, while the carefully laid mottled red sandstone walls display a self-consciously 'random' placement of stones in different hues with slight rustication applied to suggest age. A corbel table, string course at window sill level, and low moulded plinth provide horizontal articulation. A tall south porch with chamfered doorway and hoodmould stands in the second bay from the west.

The tower is impressive and dominates the street view. Square in plan with clasping buttresses terminating in large octagonal pinnacles, it features a modest west doorway beneath a triple lancet west window. The belfry is lit by two-light plate tracery openings matching those in the nave. The tower has a parapet pierced with 'arrow loops' above a toothed cornice, crowned by a slender broach spire with large lucarnes containing transoms.

The chancel is small and square, set back from the nave wall. It has two single lancet windows and a small corbel table with clasping corner buttresses. The east end features a triple lancet window with nook shafts to the jambs and a large rose window above.

The northern extension runs parallel to the north wall, its west wall set back slightly from the corner angle buttresses. It has a shallow red tiled roof and smooth rendered finish with a double door in its west wall.

Interior

The nave, now entered from the modern extension, comprises four large bays and is broad, open, and aisleless. Surfaces are plastered and painted, with the floor covered in York stone slabs. The roof was originally painted to resemble old oak. A tall, broad, and plain chamfered chancel arch separates the nave from the chancel. The chancel roof has a truss and rafters without collars, plastered behind, with one tier of purlins and two tiers of windbraces. The nave roof derives from a hammerbeam design with two tiers of purlins and windbraces.

The rose window in the chancel provides an eastern focus. A large gallery dominates the western bay, with a plain panelled frontal supported on two cast-iron columns. The gallery has been altered with a central flight of 20th-century neo-Gothic timber stairs descending into the nave and now supports an organ. Beneath the gallery is a very narrow chamfered door into the tower. A raised wooden altar platform may cover tiles.

Fixtures and Fittings

The timber communion rails, relocated and extended, are probably original to 1847, featuring trefoil-headed arcading on shafts with moulded capitals. The wooden altar table, with Gothic arcading and dogtooth decoration at the corners, appears to be original. The font, aligned with the west and south doorways, has an octagonal bowl with quatrefoil decoration on a stem of clustered shafts and corbels carved with heads.

The box pews with naïve poppyhead designs arranged against the walls and in the aisle contribute significantly to the interior's character. Documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that a central row of benches previously existed, creating two narrow aisles within the nave. These free seats, now lost, were specified to match the pews except that the latter had dwarf doors. Children's forms were originally provided in the chancel in oak, and the gallery housed free benches and children's forms without backs.

Seating arrangements changed in subsequent decades: the choir was housed on chairs by the 1890s, and in 1898 pews or seats were added to the chancel when the choir transferred to the newly adapted gallery. The box pews remain substantially intact, including their numbering.

Original plans specified 'good second Newcastle glass in lead casements' with diamond squares. Some survive, though others were replaced in the 1870s with memorial windows. The fine east window depicting angels also dates to this period.

A brass wall monument on the north wall of the chancel commemorates Thomas Wilmot, who died in 1846, signed by P Collins. A plaque at the back of the nave, erected by William Thickens (Minister) and the Churchwardens, celebrates the church's completion in 1847 and records the £200 contribution from the Incorporated Church Building Society (ICBS) on condition that 320 of the total 420 seats would be free and unappropriated forever (though these figures differ from other secondary records; ICBS records confirm the agreement and its confirmation by the Vicar once construction was complete).

The pulpit deviates from the dominant Early English Gothic style with its 17th-century appearance. It appears to incorporate 17th-century furniture pieces fashioned into a Victorian octagonal pulpit with a moulded cornice on timber stems and attached steps. Interestingly, unlike the seating, the pulpit was not detailed in the original specification, with money simply set aside for it to be decided upon later.

The gallery, though an original feature, has undergone alteration on at least two occasions: first in 1898 when strengthened to accommodate a new organ, and more recently with the construction of a central staircase with Gothic detailing. It retains some original seating. There are five bells by C and G Mears.

Historical Context

Keresley and Coundon were hamlets consolidated with a chapelry (of St Peter Harnall, taken out of Holy Trinity parish) in the early 1840s, comprising detached parts of the parishes of Holy Trinity and St Michael's. At this date the location was rural and agricultural. Local landowner T B Troughton of Coundon contributed land and stone from an adjacent quarry, as well as £40 per year towards the endowment, though the latter became subject to a dispute in 1849 when the parish claimed Holy Trinity had not honoured this commitment. The Coundon estate was deemed Glebe for the parsonage and future residence. The area later became more populated, particularly with the opening of the north district colliery, and in the 1920s a Mission Room opened. The church, however, still occupies a rural setting.

The original design included a vestry on the south side of the chancel as a lean-to, but this was placed under the tower instead. The church nave seated 420, with 320 of these free and unappropriated forever in line with the ICBS grant. The church cost over £3,000 and was built by Mr James Needham. The bond for construction, dated 31 July 1844, survives in Warwickshire Record Office, describing it as erected in accordance with nine plans, drawings, elevations, sections, and sealed specification drawn and prepared by Benjamin Ferrey of Bedford Street, Bedford Square, London (design and plans cost £1,469, with £1,845 for the builder's construction work).

Benjamin Ferrey (1810–80) was a well-known Victorian church architect, a pupil of Auguste Charles Pugin who knew Pugin's son, A W N Pugin, well and became his biographer in 1861. He also studied under William Wilkins. Ferrey established independent practice around 1834 and served as diocesan architect to Bath and Wells from 1841 until his death, explaining the large amount of church work he undertook in that diocese. He occasionally worked in the neo-Romanesque style in the 1840s but is best known as a Gothic revivalist. In his Gothic work of the 1840s, he put into practice newly adopted principles of church design involving careful and faithful copying of medieval precedents. St Thomas's is a fine example of his approach.

The building's appearance was carefully conceived, revealed most clearly in the stone selection from the quarry, which avoided top beds and selected deeper strata to recover perfect stones without scaliness. Care over aesthetics was matched by attention to robust construction, with walls strengthened by binders passing through their entire thickness. Ferrey's planning extended to the church's setting: the site was levelled to create a uniform slope around the building, and earth from the 3 feet 6 inches foundations was used to raise the chancel floor. The churchyard was consecrated in 1847 and extended in 1886. Minor changes occurred with a new path introduced in 1952, when six graves without headstones and whose next of kin could not be traced were levelled. In 1930 the parish became part of the city of Coventry, with a subsequent further extension of the churchyard in 1938.