Church Of The Holy Saviour

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SAVIOUR

This is a distinguished church of 1864–5 designed by William Butterfield, one of the most important architects of the Victorian Gothic Revival. The building was founded by the Reverend George Gainsford to serve a poor part of Hitchin, and its foundation stone was laid on 24 May 1864, with consecration by the Bishop of Rochester on 25 May 1865 at a cost of £3,040. Broad aisles were added to the north in 1880 and to the south in 1882, costing a further £1,642. Late twentieth-century parish rooms stand to the southeast and east.

The church is constructed of English bond red brick with decorative black-brick diapering and bands, Bath stone dressings, and slate roofs with red-tile crested ridges. The plan comprises a nave with wide north and south aisles, a south porch, chancel, southeast chapel, southeast vestry, and projections for a former organ chamber to the north of the chancel and a north entrance.

The west elevation is presented to the road and consists of a boldly treated west end to the nave with flanking aisles in slightly darker brick, each rising under its own gable. The nave has three large buttresses with set-offs and gable heads rising to eaves level. Between the buttresses are two-light windows with foiled circles in their heads. The upper part of the nave's west front is corbelled out for a two-tier triple bellcote under a hipped gable. The aisle west faces display extensive diapering and black-brick banding, with two-light windows similar to those of the nave, while the lean-to aisles have single-light windows with cinquefoiled heads but no hood-moulds. The chancel features limestone banding and a three-light east window with tracery of circa 1300 character, with side windows matching those in the nave's west end.

The interior walls are of bare brick except in the chancel, which was unfortunately whitewashed by Martin Travers in the 1930s. The interior is dark due to extensive added stained glass, which does not reflect Butterfield's original intentions. The five-bay nave displays the extensive polychrome patterning characteristic of Butterfield's work: bold lozenge patterns in buff brick with black bricks at the intersections, and in the upper part of the east wall a large circular motif. A clerestory is arranged with pairs of windows either side of the apices of the arcade arches. These arches die into square piers with red-brick and stone banding. The valleys of the arches contain various incised motifs picked out with black mastic. The nave roof is of scissor construction; the aisle roofs are of four sides divided into large panels. The chancel roof is six-sided with rather spindly rafters branching into Y patterns, incorporating large-scale cinquefoil patterns over the sanctuary. The floors, apart from seating areas, are tiled, including Minton's encaustic tiles in the chancel. The church was reordered in 1971–2.

The most lavish feature is the reredos in the chancel, decorated with mosaics in the panels. The higher central portion depicts the Tree of Life and incorporates a brass cross, with figures of early Church fathers in the flanking panels. Below the side panels, variously coloured stone tiles decorate the walls. Most of the pews survive, featuring shaped ends characteristic of Butterfield's work, though some have been rearranged. The original pulpit has carvings of flowers and fruit with a canopy added in 1904. The font is Butterfield's, of a characteristic design. A wrought-iron screen of perhaps circa 1900 separates the nave from the chancel.

The church possesses an important collection of stained glass. The east window, depicting the Ascension (1865), is by Alexander Gibbs, one of Butterfield's favoured makers. The sanctuary north window (1880) and the north aisle window Christ Blessing the Children (1880) are by Clayton and Bell, who also contributed to the scheme. John Hardman and Co provided all the north aisle windows except that by Clayton and Bell (1899 for the west, 1880 for the rest), all south aisle windows (1882), south clerestory windows (1888–90), north clerestory windows (1890–1), and a window in the south chapel (1879, fragments). Frederick Preedy was responsible for the nave west windows (1877), the window in the projection north of the chancel (1875), and the porch window (1877).

Work in the 1930s included a reredos now in the south chapel by Wilfred Lawson and a set of wooden Stations of the Cross completed in 1938. The organ was built in 1865 by Walker, enlarged in 1915, and rebuilt in 1987 by Grant, Degens and Bradbeer.

In the churchyard to the northeast stands a mortuary chapel, a highly unusual feature for a nineteenth-century urban church, built to receive bodies from the almshouses and orphanage across the road that were associated with the church. The foundation of Holy Saviour was representative of High Victorian Anglican piety, with Reverend Gainsford using his considerable wealth not only to build the church but to establish a school (opened 1872), orphanage (1873), and almshouses (1869) facing it across the road, all aimed at providing education and security to the local poor.

William Butterfield (1829–99) is recognised as one of the greatest nineteenth-century church architects. His career flourished from the mid-1840s when the influential Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society took him up as one of their favourite architects. In the 1850s he was responsible for All Saints, Margaret Street in London, which broke new ground in Victorian church-building through its use of brick facing and extensive polychromy in detailing. Butterfield displayed astonishing fertility of invention, with striking originality seen in intriguing uses of geometry and bold colour. Apart from All Saints, his best-known work is probably Keble College, Oxford. As a devout High Churchman, his clients were typically of similar leanings.