Christ Church

Christ Church is an Anglican church constructed in 1858-59 to serve a new parish established east of New Road in Ware. The architect was Nehemiah Edward Stevens of Tunbridge Wells, and the contractor was Dove Bros. of Islington.

The building is constructed of Kentish Ragstone in squared coursed rubble with Bath stone dressings and windows, beneath a Welsh slated roof. The plan comprises a chancel, south chapel, nave, north and south aisles, a north porch beneath a tower with spire, and a projecting south porch.

The exterior is designed in the Early English style. The walls are divided into bays by projecting buttresses with paired lancet windows between them. The chancel, which extends three bays, has single lancet windows in each bay and a triple lancet east window. The nave and aisles are separately roofed, presenting triple gables to the west elevation with the nave projecting as a single shallow bay. The north aisle is flanked by the tower, which features tall lancet arches on the ground floor providing access to the north porch; these arches were glazed in with a screen in the early 1980s. The tower has angle buttresses with four stages of offsets, a single lancet to the tower room, and twin lancets to the belfry above with louvres. A Lombard frieze ornaments the eaves of the tower, surmounted by a broach spire constructed of ashlar ragstone. The spire is embellished with lucarnes featuring cusped heads on each main face, with cusped openings in each diagonal face above.

Internally, the walls are of Ware yellow stock brick. The chancel floor is of grey and white marble and contains a triple light east window with glass by Martin Travers, installed in 1948 to replace glass destroyed by bombing in 1940; a circular sexfoiled window above it contains 1883 glass which survived the bombing. The oak communion table, panels behind it, and the reredos form a memorial to men of the parish killed in World War I. A memorial tablet on the north wall commemorates Robert Hanbury (1796-1884) of Poles, north of Ware, who funded the construction of the church, schools, mission hall and vicarage.

The chancel arch rests on corbels ornamented with stiff leaf carving. The nave has a brick arcade of seven bays with red arches, supported on circular Bath stone columns with roll moulded capitals. At the east and west ends of the nave, the arcade is supported on corbelled responds with carved stiff leaf ornament. The nave is lit by dormer windows concealed in the valley between the nave and aisle roofs. The nave and aisles feature simplified hammerbeam roofs carried on moulded stone corbels, with plastered ceilings. The aisle windows consist of paired lancets glazed with Hartleys quarries with coloured borders, beneath cusped heads in stone surrounds set within raised segmental brick arches. A polished limestone font with a concave sided octagonal bowl on a pedestal stands in the east end of the north aisle.

Christ Church was consecrated by the Bishop of Rochester on 9th November, 1858, though the tower was not completed until the following year. Although built to house a full peal, the church contains only a single 3 cwt bell, founded at Whitechapel in 1859. Christ Church School was founded in 1860 to the east of the church, with the Henry Page Memorial Hall built to its left in 1895.