Church Of St Simon

Church with attached hall built between 1879 and 1886, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, with late twentieth-century alterations.

The church is constructed of yellow stock brick with red-brick and ashlar dressings, featuring a renewed plain tile roof with decorative ridge tiles. It is designed in the Gothic style with a chamfered plinth, pointed-arched openings, and cusped lights to the windows. The board doors are fitted with decorative hinges and set within gabled projections, with all openings having hoodmoulds on foliate ball stops. The building incorporates buttresses with offsets and gablets, stepped eaves, and moulded ashlar coping to the gables and raised verges, with ashlar finials completing the design.

The plan comprises a 3-bay chancel, a 7-bay aisled nave with the south aisle widening at the west end where the two western bays are roofed transversely, a polygonal north-west tower, and a hall at the east end.

The west end features a large plate-tracery window of 2 lights and a sexfoil, flanked by 1-light windows. A central door opens into a gabled porch, with a second door on the right in a half-gabled porch giving access to a lower bay set at right-angles. A 4-stage clock tower projects from the left corner. The first stage has lancets; the second stage displays red-brick diaper-work; the third stage has a triple arcade on each face with louvred slit windows to the central arches; the fourth stage features an offset base with 2 gablets, a cusped louvred light on each face, a continuous hoodmould, and 3 clock dials. Stepped dentilled eaves sit below a brick steeple with ashlar bands pierced by quatrefoils, topped by a metal cross-finial.

The north side aisle contains one 2-light and three 3-light windows, with doorways at the west end and to the left. The north clerestorey has 5 paired windows and one single window set in recessed panels with cogged brick heads. The chancel clerestorey features sexfoil windows in similar recesses. At lower level on the left, a gabled bay projects with 3 stepped windows, while the aisle continuation on the right has a door under a gablet. A low projecting bay across the front of the left bay, containing a 3-light window, links the church to the hall.

The south side is similar in arrangement, with 2 gabled bays at the west end each containing a window of 3 stepped lights. An east window of 5 stepped lights completes this elevation.

The hall is constructed of red brick in English bond with ashlar dressings and features a tripartite roof with a gabled centre and flanking flat-roofed bays. It is single-storey with a clerestorey, measuring 3 by 4 bays and positioned gable-end on. Each gable end has a large, square-headed, stepped, 4-light mullion-and-transom window. Each return has 2 clerestorey windows of 3 stepped, pointed-arched lights rising through eaves under gablets.

The interior of the church contains 5-bay aisle arcades with brick arches carried on stone columns with simple bases and foliate capitals, the end arches being narrower. A similar chancel arch is carried by corbelled attached piers. Principal-rafter roof trusses feature corbelled arch braces, through purlins, and collared rafters. A glazed tile dado runs throughout, with stencilled decoration to the chancel walls and reredos. A decorative pink marble war memorial is positioned within the church. The two western bays of the nave were separated off circa 1980.

The hall interior features simply-moulded columns to the arcades, an arch-braced roof, a corbelled mantelpiece to the fireplace, and panelled cupboards.

This is a well-detailed late-Victorian church designed by a significant architect.