Church Of St Mark

Church of St Mark

This Anglican church, now a chapel and concert hall for St Mary's Hall School, was built between 1840 and 1849 on land given to the school by the Marquess of Bristol. It was designed by Thomas Cooper in the Gothic Revival style, Early English manner. A new chancel, vestry and parish rooms were added in 1891–1892 by W Gilbert Scott, and the chancel was decorated in 1913.

The building materials reflect its two construction phases. The original structure uses concrete cast in blocks to resemble Kentish ragstone, with stucco scored to imitate ashlar stonework on the north side. The late 19th-century extensions to the east and south-east are built in roughly dressed ashlar with stone dressings. All roofs are of slate.

The plan comprises a one-bay chancel with a vestry to the north and an organ chamber to the south. The choir enclosure projects partly into the seven-bay nave, which is defined by north and south aisles formed by tall, thin cast-iron columns. Parish rooms extend off the three eastern bays of the nave on the south side, originally accessed by a two-bay pointed-arch arcade, now blocked. A four-stage west tower with an octagonal spire dominates the composition, flanked by entrance porches with lean-to roofs.

The exterior shows identical north and south elevations, each interior bay marked by a single lancet separated by shallow four-stage buttresses. The west tower carries one lancet with exceptionally broad splays to each stage, set back corner buttresses, and small spirelet pinnacles above each corner buttress. Three pointed-arch entrances in the west elevation feature dripstones and exceptionally deep splays.

Internally, the nave and aisles form one large rectangular space subdivided by tall, thin cast-iron colonnettes. Each nave bay has one wood collar-beam truss with the angle between beam and truss strutted by an iron traceried spandrel. A principal purlin runs lengthwise between posts, stiffened by struts filled with tri-lobed Gothic mouchettes. The boarded ceiling follows the steep roof pitch to the nave centre, where it flattens. A west gallery on separate supports has a traceried gallery front.

The late 19th-century south and south-east extensions are organized around steep facing gables. The two-bay south extension features two three-light tracery windows under gables, three lancets in the west wall, corner buttresses with two setbacks topped by pinnacles, and a continuous sill band. The chancel and organ chamber are connected by a sill band and have three-light and single-light traceried windows respectively, with shallow buttresses. A single-storey entrance porch lies to the south of the organ chamber. The vestry to the north is a single storey with a three-light plate-tracery window. Oak boarded roofs with moulded principals and carved bosses cover the south-east extension and vestry.

The organ projects from its chamber through a single pointed-arched bay into the nave and chancel, with sedilia applied to the organ case. The chancel is raised above the nave and demarcated by a low parapet wall of cast metal, painted to resemble stone. This wall encloses a choir with carved wood stalls in collegiate arrangement. The sacrarium is set off from the nave by a chancel arch supported on polished stone corbelled shafts, with a boarded barrel vault ceiling. Wall surfaces are marked by blank pointed-arch arcading filled with polychromatic revetments. Along the east wall runs a carved pointed-arch arcade to the height of the east window sill, with the reredos formed from a smaller arcade. The chancel fittings date to the 1890s, while the polychromatic decoration and reredos are a memorial to Henry and Fanny Abbey, dated 1913 according to a plaque in the chancel.

The church was noted in The Builder in 1847 as one of several concrete structures in Brighton, becoming a notable example of early concrete construction.