Church Of St Paul With St Stephen

Church of St Paul with St Stephen

This church was built in 1878 to the designs of Newman and Billing, architects who specialised in church work across London. The building stands on a corner site at the junction of St Stephen's Road in east London, one of many churches erected in the mid-Victorian period to serve the rapidly expanding population of the area.

The church is constructed of stock brick with limestone and red-brick dressings, finished with Welsh slate roofs. The plan comprises a nave, north-west tower, north and south passage aisles, a western porch, a round-apsed chancel, and north-west vestries with an organ chamber.

The exterior is dominated by a complex arrangement of forms at the west end. The most prominent feature is the tall gable of the nave, which contains a large, high-set window of six lights with three circles in the tracery, themselves containing uncusped circles. At the north-west angle stands the base of a circular tower-turret which originally carried a spire, removed in 1955. The tower has flat buttresses in the cardinal directions and single-light windows in the intermediate ones. The central feature of the west front is a gabled and shafted entrance portico behind which rises a half-conical roof to just above the base of the west window, serving as an entrance area and originally functioning as a baptistry. It is lit by five trefoiled windows. Lean-to roofs spread out from the porch towards the tower to the north and the nave buttresses to the south. The latter are of set-back type and embrace a diagonally-placed doorway at the angle.

The side elevations display five gables breaking through the eaves line of the nave, each enclosing a large clerestory window of three lights with sturdy, detailed designs mostly involving uncusped circles. Large buttresses rise between each bay to just above the springing of the windows. In the lower parts between the buttresses are steeply-pitched lean-to roofs expressing the internal arrangement of passage aisles, which have no fenestration. At the north-west end stands a single-storey vestry. The windows to the chancel are wide single lancets. The nave roof is pierced by pairs of porthole-like openings to provide light and ventilation to internal spaces.

Internally, the church is faced with red brick, painted white at some stage in the twentieth century, though parts of this painting have been removed. The original nineteenth-century design creates a short but wide vessel with the chancel and nave in unified space. The aisles are reduced to mere passages set behind large square piers which form the internal continuation of the external buttressing system. The arches from the nave to the aisles have a single step with a roll at the angle. Small transverse arches span the aisles between the piers and side walls. In the sanctuary, shafts rise from near ground level to the roof springing, interrupted by a string-course running below the windows. The nave roof begins with boarded vaulting penetrated by clerestory window openings, though it is now largely obscured by twenty-first-century insertions. The sanctuary roof has ribs rising to a central point, with surfaces painted blue and representations of Christ in glory flanked by angels in the three central bays.

In 2004, Matthew Lloyd of Shoreditch inserted parish rooms and ancillary facilities within the church. This work has substantially altered the interior, with the west end partitioned for entrance area and kitchen facilities, while the main structure of the nave is carried on white-painted tubular steel supports arranged in Y-shaped pairs, one pair on each side. The structure, with bare timber facing on the east and underside, extends to the top of the roof and fills much of the building.

The church retains some original nineteenth-century fittings. Bench seating with shaped ends bearing numbers has been reused in the nave. The choir and sanctuary retain their original patterned tiles. The font is original, displaying florid High Victorian decoration with a semi-circular bowl clasped by four gable-like buttress features, standing on a circular shaft with four detached shafts bearing foliage capitals. The wooden altar is a robustly detailed piece with curved crossing members at the ends.

To the south stands a large, three-storey brick-built former vicarage.

The church is typical of mid-Victorian ecclesiastical design, employing a free and inventive use of muscular Gothic forms appropriate to the period of the 1860s and 1870s. The foundation stone was laid on 11 January 1878 by John Derby Allcroft, chairman of the building committee. The builders were F and F J Woods, as noted on the foundation stone.

Arthur Shean Newman (1828–73) and Arthur Billing (1824–96) entered into partnership in London around 1860, developing an extensive practice centred on church work, predominantly in London. They also served as surveyors to Guy's Hospital and to St Olave's District Board of Works. After Newman's death in 1873, Billing took his son on as partner in 1890. Billing had trained in the office of Benjamin Ferrey, the well-known Gothic Revival architect, from 1847 and commenced independent practice in 1849.