Church Of The Holy Spirit

Church of the Holy Spirit, Fawcett Road, Southsea, Portsmouth

A parish church built between 1902 and 1924 to the designs of JT Micklethwaite, succeeded by Sir Charles Nicholson. The church was bombed in 1941 and underwent reroofing and restoration between 1956 and 1958 by Stephen Dykes Bower, who incorporated nineteenth-century fittings by Temple Moore salvaged from St Agnes, Kennington, London.

The building is constructed of red brick with walls of great thickness (3 feet 9 inches) and slate roofs, except over the east end parish rooms which have a flat roof. The plan comprises a five-and-a-half bay nave with aisles, a two-bay chancel, and a shorter two-bay chapel of St John and Lady Chapel accessed via a flight of stone steps over the vestry to the sides. Choir room and church rooms to the east survive in a less altered state after the war damage.

The exterior is austere, set back behind houses and barely visible from the road. Seven windows light the south side and nine the north, all in Perpendicular style, with a wider five-light west window and high three-light windows set under steep-pitched gables at the east end. The entrance from Fawcett Road has a stone surround beneath a flat 1950s porch.

The interior retains a nineteenth-century arcade (though with capitals removed), a rear gallery over the baptistry, and chancel mouldings and steps to the chapel. Dykes Bower reduced the arches to the Lady Chapel from four to three. The whitening and lightening of the entire interior, with an elaborately painted organ case and ceiling, exemplifies his finest work. The east window contains glass by CE Kempe from St Bartholomew, which was also bombed in 1941. Additional Kempe glass from St Agnes, Kennington, appears in the Lady Chapel east window and three panels of the west window. Fragments of nineteenth-century glass from St Bartholomew's and St Agnes's remain in the Chapel of St John. The altar has been moved forward of the east end gradine, and fitments commemorate Father Bruce Cornford.

Temple Moore's furnishings from St Agnes, Kennington, include a pulpit with very elaborate Gothic traceried patternwork (1891), choir stalls (1900), and a font with soaring, elaborate cover (1893). A cast-iron lectern by Bainbridge Reynolds from St Andrew, Worthing, is also present. The organ was rebuilt in the 1950s.

The church was originally built as St Matthew's by Father Bruce Cornford (1867–1940), its incumbent, for whom the fundraising and building of the church was his life's work. He replaced a cast-iron church of 1888 with this new parish church through, as recorded, "slow, hard, unlovely beggary", creating one of the most elaborate high Anglican churches of the early twentieth century, particularly noted for its organ and a massive First World War memorial reredos by Nicholson. Its replacement, though far more austere, is no less moving, relying on the expression of space and focal points of particular interest. St Agnes' itself was entirely demolished after wartime bombing but was a key building in the development of the later Gothic Revival. The surviving fittings of exceptional quality and vivacity from that church are now rare evidence of its importance. St Agnes' was designed by George Gilbert Scott Junior in 1874–1877 and completed by Temple Moore after 1880. It was influential on several generations of architects up to and including Dykes Bower, who may be regarded as the end of a distinguished English tradition in high church architecture.