Methodist Church

Methodist Church, Saffron Walden

A church and meeting rooms built between 1864 and 1868, constructed in grey gault brick with red brick and stone dressings, composition tile and slated roofs. The building has a rectangular plan, narrower at the rear where the meeting rooms are located.

The south front elevation faces Castle Street with a gable containing red brickwork banding. A large upper lancet recess holds a pair of inset 2+2 paired lancet windows, each fitted with 3-paned casements. A round window with saltire glazing bars sits in the tympanum. The gable features tumbled red brickwork and stone caps with gabled kneelers. At ground level, a projecting gabled porch in similar style has kneelers and red brick dwarf tumbled brick buttresses to its sides. The porch doorway is lancet-shaped with double recessed surround and a prominent red brick inner arch. The door has two boarded leaves with decorative C-hinges. An oculus window with leaf-patterned yellow glass appears on each side of the porch gable.

The north elevation contains the assembly rooms, built in line with but smaller in scale than the church. It is constructed of gault brick with slate hanging on the gable. The ground floor has two single-light windows and one 2-light window in an older segmented headed aperture. The first floor has one single-light window. Behind this, the north wall of the church proper is built in red brick with a blocked oculus window high in the gable.

The east and west side elevations are similar. The church body has 5 pilastered bays in black brick with red brick banding. The pilasters have double stepped sections, and one pilaster, third from the south, carries a cast brick ornamental capital. Each bay contains paired lancet windows with red brick dressings, each window fitted with 3-paned casements. The meeting rooms to the north have 20th-century windows throughout. The west side has a boarded door on the first floor (19th century) with one 3-light and one single-light casement window. The east side has a 20th-century door with upper glazed panel and full-height side light, adjacent to a 3-light casement window.

The interior of the church was fully refurbished in the 20th century with a dropped plain ceiling. Underlying this are 19th-century deep arched braces rising from moulded stone corbels, which pass through the present ceiling.

The chapel was constructed in 1864 by an unknown architect and was principally funded by Charlotte Berger, a well-known local Wesleyan activist. The Sunday school to the rear was not constructed until 1868. The chapel was reordered in 1896 and again in the 1950s when the school room was partially rebuilt in gault brick. During the 1950s campaign, an organ was installed in place of the pulpit and new vestries and choir stalls were constructed on either side of the organ. Further reordering in 1994 removed the vestries, replaced the organ with the pulpit, created a glazed narthex (a partitioned entrance or lobby area at the end of the nave), and removed the pews. In 2004, new windows were inserted with stained glass depicting the Stations of the Cross. During the later 20th century, a false ceiling was inserted.

The Methodist chapel is of special interest as an early example of Gothic-style structural polychromatic brickwork used in a non-conformist chapel. Despite some alteration to the interior, the chapel retains striking architectural treatment on its façade and has considerable presence in the townscape.