Roman Catholic Chapel at Earlham Cemetery

The Roman Catholic Chapel at Earlham Cemetery is a Gothic style chapel built between 1874 and 1875 as part of the Earlham Cemetery in Norwich. It was designed by the architect John Bond Pearce (1843-1904) to provide burial facilities for the Roman Catholic community.

The chapel is constructed from split flint with ashlar dressings, with a steeply-pitched roof covered in Welsh slate. The roof has coped gables and cross finials. The building is rectangular, composed of three bays and two cells, creating a nave and an apsidal sanctuary.

The chapel is oriented east-west. The west gable features a shallow, gabled and buttressed porch with a moulded, pointed-arched doorway framed by slender black marble shafts with foliated capitals. Above the porch, a ten-light wheel window sits within a heavily moulded surround, and in the gable apex is a quatrefoil plaque indicating the year ‘A D 1875’. The building’s corners have low clasping buttresses, and the side walls feature paired, pointed-arched windows with trefoil and quatrefoil tracery in the arch heads, all set beneath hood moulds with foliated stops. A continuous string course runs along the side walls, interrupted by a low gabled buttress at the midpoint. A tall, slender octagonal spire with miniature lucarnes and paired lancets rises from the south-east corner, above the bell stage. A small polygonal apse is lit by tall, slender lancet windows.

Inside, the roof structure is supported by lightweight double hammer beam trusses and a single tier of purlins. The trusses at either end rest on wall corbels with foliage decoration. The window reveals are set beneath single arches with hood moulds and foliated stops, rising from slender black marble shafts. The sanctuary has a pierced wooden cornice decorated with quatrefoils.

The chapel is currently used for storage, but it retains a small table altar in the sanctuary and several small wall monuments commemorating clergy associated with the chapel.