Bromsgrove School Memorial Chapel

666/0/10051 WORCESTER ROAD 23-MAY-02 (South side) Bromsgrove School Memorial Chapel

II

Chapel. 1931, to the designs of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and executed by J and A. Brazier Ltd for Bromsgrove School. Extended by one bay to west in 1960. Pale brown brickwork with Clipsham stone dressings; plain tile roofs. Long rectangular plan, dominated by the nave. Abstracted Late Gothic style. 5-light Perpendicular east window with curvilinear tracery framing central panel, the flanking walls of the chancel extending as deeply-angled buttresses and with Gothic tracery wrought in brickwork to the upper courses. Decorated style transept windows set in narrow gable ends. &-bay nave with 3-light flat-headed windows each with round-arched lights. Each bay is articulated by a stone-capped buttress that runs into a deeply-splayed plinth and which alternately take the downpipes of the drainage system. Large buttresses with gablets divide the nave from the west end, which has similar (to chancel) 5-light window flaning by deeply-splayed buttresses that clasp the porch: this has double-leaf doors set in chamfered stone surround flanked by 2-light mullioned windows which are linked across the doorway by a Caernarvon arch. The north wall has two similar 4-light mullioned windows lighting inner vestibule; south wall has deeply angled buttress housing the gallery stairs, and lit by two small lancets.

INTERIOR: is dominated by a soaring arch-braced open timber roof sprung from stone corbels, loosely based on medieval forms and distinguished by the use of adze-faced oak in order to recreate the feel of a medieval tithe barn. Japanese oak was used for the finely-crafted pews and choir stalls. The limed oak altar, which has alternate panels of crocketed tracery, and reredos display the influence of the Bromsgrove Guild in their exceptionally fine levels of craftsmanship: the reredos has an Ascesion scene set in an upward-sweeping panelramed by delicate openwork tracery. Stained glass to west end and to east window.

HISTORY: This chapel was built as a monument to those boys of Bromsgrove School who died in the First World War. Scott designed the fine chapel at Charterhouse School, Godalming (listed II*), as a memorial, the Bromsgrove example - by a distinguished firm of builders - displaying a similar fusion of Arts and Crafts and Gothic styles, and the bold design and meticulous craftsmanship characteristic of his work.

(A Crawford, Braziers of Bromsgrove: Bromsgrove, 1996, pp. 47-51)