Christ Church

Christ Church, Ottershaw

A mid-Victorian church built in 1863 by George Gilbert Scott, with a tower added in 1885 and parish rooms added in the 1990s. The building is constructed mainly of red brick with black brick and freestone bands creating a polychromatic effect. The roofs are covered in red clay tiles, with wooden shingles on the spire.

The church comprises a nave, a semi-circular-apsed chancel, a west tower and spire, a northeast chapel (formerly the organ chamber), and parish rooms on the south side.

The chancel features a series of lancet windows grouped in threes on the northeast and southeast parts of the apse, with single lights at the east end and on the south. All these windows have nook shafts, as do the nave windows, which are mostly two-light windows with quatrefoil tracery-pieces in the heads. Sturdy buttresses mark the east end of the nave and the bays of the apse. The west tower has a projecting polygonal northwest stair turret with a shouldered doorway and a stone spirelet. The belfry stage displays Early English style blind arches with nook shafts flanking two-light belfry windows. The west face has a pair of lancet windows below a wheel window. The spire is of the chamfer type with hooded louvres. The original south doorway, now internal, features nook shafts with moulded capitals and a richly-moulded arch with alternating brick and stone.

Inside, the walls were originally bare brick but have been painted white. One tile band below the eaves and running around the nave and chancel is exposed, though another has been painted over. Between the nave and chancel is a chancel arch with deep moulding and a pair of shafts with deeply undercut carved capitals depicting passion flowers and roses. The nave roof has arch-braced trusses with scissor-braced collars and scissor-braced common rafters above the purlins. At the east end, the apse roof is also scissor-braced with a carved central boss; the principal rafters are chamfered and carried on carved corbels. The apse windows have internal shafts.

The dominant interior feature is an impressive painted and gilded carved wooden reredos designed by Charles Eamer Kempe, installed in 1901 and dedicated the following year. Its figure groups were made in Oberammagau and feature delicate canopy-work. Hinged doors flank either side. The decoration was undertaken by Norman and Burt. The apse has a blind arcaded timber dado of trefoil-headed arches on shafts, a similar pierced sanctuary rail, an altar table with blind arcaded front, and an encaustic tiled floor. The tower arch at the west end is tall with shafts and capitals. The organ was placed in the tower in the 20th century and there is a 20th-century timber organ gallery. The nave has a wooden dado of blind arcading with brattished cresting. The nave seats have upside-down Y profiles to the ends, carved with rosettes. The nave floor is made of wooden blocks and its walls are decorated with painted figures of the Evangelists in polychromatic wooden frames, acquired about 1886 and probably by Herbert Wilson. The font is original to the church with an octagonal bowl featuring ivy-leaf carving around the rim and IHC emblems on the faces, on a base with columns with moulded capitals. The pulpit in the northeast corner is also original, standing on a stone base. The stained glass includes windows by Kempe.

The church was built in 1864 to serve the local population of the Ottershaw Estate and village. There was no church on the site previously. The land was given by Sir Thomas Edward Colebrooke. George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) was the foremost church architect of his day, having begun practice in the late 1830s. He also designed major secular buildings including the Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras. He was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1859 and knighted in 1872; he is buried in Westminster Abbey. His new churches generally derive their character from late 13th- or early 14th-century architecture, avoiding the more florid High Victorian style popular from the late 1850s to the 1870s. Christ Church is unusual in Scott's work for its extensive use of brick polychromy; it is one of only four churches he designed in this manner, the others being at Crewe Green, Cheshire (1857–8), St Andrew, Leicester (1860–2), and St Andrew, Uxbridge (1865).