Church Of St Patrick

The Church of St Patrick consists of a nave and chancel designed by W.H. Bidlake between 1897 and 1902, combined with an earlier tower built in 1860-1 by G.T. Robinson.

Materials and Construction

The tower is constructed of red brick with varied stone dressings, while the nave is red brick externally and buff brick internally. The roofs are clay-tiled throughout.

Plan

The church comprises a west tower serving as a large porch, a five-bay nave without aisles, a raised chancel, and an organ chamber on the north side with rooms below, including an apsidal crypt beneath the sanctuary.

Exterior

The Tower (1860-1)

Robinson's Early English Gothic tower is a stridently designed structure in red brick with varied polychrome dressings. It features angle buttresses with set-offs and finishes with a gable on each face, topped by steep tiled roofs whose ridges form a cross. The original ironwork and large crosses have been lost. Each gable contains a single three-light bell-opening with three circles in the tracery. Below these, paired lancets frame a clock face.

The main west-facing entrance is particularly elaborate, with double doors set well back and detached shafts between them and in the reveals. The doors have triple cusped heads, with a commemorative inscription in a single band spanning both doors. The tympanum features a cusped circular medallion depicting the Ascension. Mr Wood served as the principal stone carver for the tower. The outer framing arch is richly moulded with dogtooth decoration, bands of foliage and stiff-leaf crockets, supported on multiple columns of green Horton and pink Mansfield stone. The stone gable above the entrance continues straight down into sloped buttresses. An intriguing detail is the staircase rising diagonally up the north face of the tower, corbelled out on a curving arch.

The Nave and Chancel (1897-1902)

Behind the tower's exuberance, the gabled front of Bidlake's nave presents a more restrained appearance. The nave features five tall two-light windows with a single transom positioned low down and curvilinear tracery. Between the windows, heavy buttresses terminate with gabled tops at the level of the window cills. Above these rise slim projections of triangular section, which anticipate the interior arrangement. Unusually for a church, the eaves project, so the buttresses are capped by the eaves soffit.

The chancel is blind at the north and south sides and features a large five-light east window with Free Gothic tracery. Below this window is a roofed three-sided projection housing the sanctuary. The chancel is raised above a crypt with broad arched openings. The openings beneath the sanctuary were glazed in 2001-2, and a low, unobtrusive kitchen extension was added north of the chancel at the same time.

Interior

The Tower Base and Nave

The west doors open onto a small but richly vaulted vestibule in the base of the tower, executed in 13th-century style. By contrast, the nave is remarkably spare and elegant, faced entirely with buff brick. Below the window cills, the walls are panelled in oak.

The dominant features are unmoulded triangular projections between the nave windows, like extensions of the window reveals but so large that no flat wall remains on the sides of the nave except small areas above the window embrasures. The point of each projection continues upward to serve as a springer for the roof truss. Bidlake's extrapolation of the Gothic style here exceeds that at St Agatha, Sparkbrook, for which St Patrick appears to have been his preparation. Phillada Ballard describes it as "a glorious interior space of great clarity, brought alive by the fluidity of its surfaces."

The oak roof features simple arched trusses with painted patterns and boarding between the rafters. The chancel arch has chamfered mouldings of brick, dying into unbroken canted walls that form the piers. Access to the built-in pulpit is through an opening in the north pier via a brick arch with triple wave mouldings. Steps up from the crypt vestries emerge on either side of the arch.

The Chancel

A flight of eight steps leads up to the raised chancel, though a raised plinth of around 2002 obscures the lowest two steps. The chancel floor is black and white marble. The east window has five lights with Free Gothic tracery. Below is a low moulded arch opening into a small vaulted sanctuary lit by two tiny windows in the canted side walls. The sanctuary has a stone rib vault with stencilled compartments to the ceiling.

Principal Fixtures

The elaborate reredos of 1910 is oak with Flamboyant tracery, a frame of thickly carved vines, and an oil painting by Frederick W. Davis of Birmingham depicting the Last Supper, with carefully observed heads set against a gold background. The east window, altar, rails, stalls and chancel screen are also from 1910, executed in Free Perpendicular style in finely carved oak. The style and quality suggest that the Bromsgrove Guild may have supplied some fittings.

The organ case dates from 1913. From the same year are two large paintings on canvas set in arched recesses on the nave west wall, depicting the life of St Patrick by Bernard Sleigh, a member of the Bromsgrove Guild. Between these is an oak balcony sprung from vaulting over the west door, behind which is the tower arch, closed by an oak screen. The balcony and screen were added in 1936.

Behind the organ survive fragments of an elaborate Arts and Crafts scheme of wallpaper-like painted decoration which once covered the chancel. The First World War memorial window is by Pearce & Cutler, dating from around 1920.

History

St Patrick began as a chapel-of-ease to the parish church of Tanworth-in-Arden, about three miles south. The churchwardens who instigated the meeting in 1827 at which it was decided to build a chapel at Salter Street were members of the Burman family, who became benefactors of later building phases. Funds came from the purchase of land in the parish to build a feeder reservoir (now Earlswood Lakes) for the Stratford Canal.

The chapel was finally built in 1837-40 to the design of James Benjamin Harper of Henley-in-Arden. It was a simple five-bay brick building with galleries, seating 390. In 1860-1, Thomas Burman of Waring's Green commissioned the building of the tower in memory of his parents at a cost of about £1200.

In 1897, Miss Elizabeth Burman commissioned the rebuilding of the nave and chancel by architect W.H. Bidlake. The high-quality fittings of 1910-13 were gifts by the Misses Mynors in memory of their father, who served as vicar here from 1846 to 1886. These were perhaps also designed by Bidlake, who was engaged by the same clients in 1908-9 to add a tower at Wythall church in Worcestershire.

William Henry Bidlake (1861-1938) was born in Wolverhampton, the son of an architect. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London and under Bodley & Garner, the outstanding late Victorian church practice. He established his independent practice in 1887 and taught architecture at the Birmingham School of Art from 1893. He designed many Arts and Crafts houses and several Gothic churches, of which St Agatha, Sparkbrook, is acknowledged as his masterpiece.

G.T. Robinson (1829-97) was a High Victorian "rogue architect" from Leamington Spa who built extensively in Wolverhampton.