Church Of St Paul

CHURCH OF ST PAUL

Built in 1849 by Samuel Sanders Teulon to replace an earlier chapel, this is a Gothic Revival church in yellow stock brick with sandstone dressings and slate roofs, situated on a steep south-facing slope at Sandgate. The building comprises a nave, chancel, north and south aisles, a west porch, and north and south vestries.

The most prominent exterior feature is the south elevation, dominated by four transverse gables on the south aisle, each containing a tall, uncusped, transomed window with two lights and a large circle in the head. Similar windows appear on the north side. Small amounts of polychrome decoration, chiefly red bricks outlining the window heads, enliven the facades. The west elevation displays a broad five-light window inserted in 1923–25 by C M Oldrid-Scott, featuring minimal cusping at the top and wide mullions between the outer lights, each containing a tall, cusped recess. Beneath this window stands a rendered First World War memorial porch added in 1919 by W C M Oldrid-Scott. The east ends of the aisles have three-light, cusped intersecting tracery windows, and the chancel windows display two and three lights with varying 14th-century-style tracery. The remains of a bellcote, which once crowned the west gable, were removed in 2008.

The interior walls are plastered and whitened. Between the nave and aisles, four-bay arcades feature tall arches rising to just below roof level, with single chamfers carried on octagonal piers with moulded capitals but unusually without bases. Wall-shafts rise from the capitals to carry arch braces to the roof. The lower roof section is coved below raised tie-beams; above these the roof becomes five-sided. The chancel arch is broad with an arched head dying without capitals into plain responds. A simple arch to the east leads to the sanctuary. Both choir and sanctuary areas have roofs divided into panels.

The interior decoration of the roofs is a notable feature, executed by Charles Powell between 1927 and 1936. The nave coving displays the Instruments of the Passion, the choir features emblems of worship and thanksgiving against a greenish ground, while the chancel has a blue ground with stars.

The Victorian nave seating with shaped bench ends remains largely intact, as do twentieth-century choir stalls. The chancel has graded sedilia, and a low screen dating from 1925 marks the entrance to the chancel. An octagonal font decorated with quatrefoils on each face of the bowl is present. Stained glass windows include works by Robert Anning Bell (east window, 1923; west window, 1925), Leonard Walker (east end of north aisle, 1935), Wallace Wood (north aisle northeast window, with phases of 1958 and 1965), and Victorian stained glass in the southwest corner.

The church underwent minor restoration and removal of galleries by Temple Moore in 1915. Between 1923 and 1925, a bay was added to the chancel to form a sanctuary, and a new west window was installed.

Originally, St Paul's replaced an earlier chapel known as the Sandgate Episcopal Chapel, built by the Earl of Darnley at his own expense and consecrated on 28 May 1822. The new church was constructed in response to rapid development following the arrival of the railway in 1843, initially accommodating 890 people. The building remained a chapel of ease until 1888, when it gained parish status.

Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812–73) was a prominent and prolific church architect, primarily working for Low Church clients and being himself a devout Evangelical. He was responsible for approximately 114 new churches, recastings, and restorations. His work is characterised by striking use of structural polychromy and exotic architectural details. At St Paul's, Teulon employs the distinctive transverse gables on the aisles and introduces limited polychrome several years before this became widespread practice, demonstrating how late-1840s architects were beginning to develop Gothic architecture in novel ways, moving beyond the faithful medieval copyism of earlier decades.