Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady Help of Christians and St Augustine's Hall

Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady Help of Christians and St Augustine's Hall

The Church of Our Lady Help of Christians was built in 1909 to designs by Arthur Young. It stands prominently at the eastern approach to Rickmansworth, adjoining a late 19th-century malthouse now known as St Augustine's Hall. The church is constructed in concrete but faced with field flints, under a tiled roof with scalloped banding, with ashlar stone dressings. It is built in a conventional but assured 14th-century Gothic style more usually associated with Anglican churches.

The church faces south and is accessed via a porch to the south. The plan comprises a tower to the west (now enclosed at ground floor to form a sacristy), a nave with a north aisle, a Lady Chapel to the east (added in 1935), and confessionals at the west end of the aisle (formerly a baptistery). The former sacristies at the south-east now contain a repository. The altar platform has been brought forward beyond the chancel arch, in the round.

The exterior employs late medieval style Perpendicular windows. The tower is buttressed in three stages with an overhanging broach steeple and is dominated by a three-light window which lights the gallery. The two-light mullioned windows in the belfry are suggestive of a 16th or 17th-century date. The porch is half-timbered above a flint-faced plinth, with a four-centred opening and stained timber-sheeted doors. The former sacristy is double-gabled and faced in flint, with a pointed-arched entrance and four-light mullioned window with label moulding. The nave and aisle are lit by pairs of leaded quarry lights with segmental heads and hood mouldings. The east window has five lights. The north aisle, terminating with the former baptistery at the west and the Lady Chapel at the east, is canted at each end with a concealed roof behind a parapet. A single-opening bellcote sits above the nave-sanctuary junction, currently without its bell. St Augustine's Hall, attached to the east end of the church, is faced with brick and has Perpendicular fenestration suggestive of the 16th century. Beyond it is the presbytery, built in 1994, which follows the style of the hall on a slightly larger scale; the presbytery is not of special interest.

The interior walls are plastered and whitened. Over the nave, the boarded roof is of broad keel-shape; the roof over the sanctuary is vaulted with timber-sheeted ribs and bosses at the junctions. A principal interior feature is the three-bay arcade with segmental arches to the north aisle; the inner chamfering of the arches dies into simple chamfered piers. At the west end a small gallery is set in the lower part of the tower, with carved timber former altar rails re-used as a parapet. The original sanctuary is framed by a pointed chancel arch. The sanctuary has been reordered and furnished sparsely, with the tabernacle supported on a Gothic stone pedestal within a chamfered recess. The original high altar has been brought forward and truncated by Ormesby of Scarisbrick. The Lady Chapel is entirely clad in carved and fretted timber panelling by Fr. Gregory Chedal, with a Caen stone and marble altar and terrazzo flooring. Timber benches, individually carved by Fr. Gregory Chedal, have been retained throughout.

The east window depicts the Holy Family, St Augustine and St Anna, dated 1911 and signed by Gustave Pierre Dagrant of Bordeaux, presumably known to the French Assumptionists. The windows in the Lady Chapel depict the Nativity, Presentation, and Christ and the Doctors (south), and the Annunciation and Visitation (north), by Joseph E. Nuttgens, dated around 1935.