Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Sorrows

Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Sorrows

This Roman Catholic church was built in 1881 by Joseph Stanislaus Hansom in Early English style, with sympathetic additions made between 1955 and 1957 by Wilfrid Clarence Mangan.

Hansom's original church is constructed of white brick with dressings of Westwood stone from Corsham in Wiltshire. Mangan's additions are of yellow brick with Bath stone dressings. The pitched main roofs are covered with Welsh slate.

The church comprises a wide and tall aisleless nave with three full-height shallow projections on each side, and a long apsidal-ended sanctuary that is narrower than the nave, with a Lady Chapel on its northern side.

The principal façade is the impressive west front facing Clarence Road. The width of the nave is defined by stepped buttresses with image niches in their heads. Between them the lower part of the wall is plain, with a projecting gabled porch in the centre. Above the porch is a continuous band of arcading pierced by small pointed windows. Above the arcading in the head of the gable is a massive rose window in plate tracery. On either side of the nave proper are single bay projections with a lancet window at lower level and the band of arcading continued above.

The north and south sides are of six bays and have lean-to aisles intersected by three full-height single-bay transeptal projections. On the north side the outer walls of both aisle and projections are blind, with stepped triple lancet windows in the recessed clerestory, producing an oddly bleak appearance. On the south side both projections and clerestory have stepped triple lancets. The sanctuary is lower than the nave and slightly narrower. The side walls have three tall two-light traceried windows separated by pilaster buttresses, with two similar windows in the apse. On the north side of the sanctuary is the lower flat-roofed Lady Chapel; on the south side the single-storey, flat-roofed cloister with simple rectangular stone mullioned window openings.

The interior of the nave is a single volume space of great height. The church does not have continuous aisles but there are side chapels alternately low and full height under pointed arches alternately blind and open. Covering the whole nave is a tall pointed roof, boarded and panelled with the principal rafters brought down onto wall shafts between the bays of the clerestory. The western bay is filled by a timber organ gallery which was installed in 1922 and was enclosed beneath in the 1980s to form a vestibule. The floors are mostly modern parquet, but some earlier boarded flooring survives under the nave benches. The windows are clear glazed throughout. An unmoulded pointed opening in the east wall of the nave leads to the apsidal-ended sanctuary, which has a plaster vaulted ceiling. The raised level of the sanctuary was brought forward into the eastern bay of the nave as part of a reordering in 1985. In the eastern bay of the nave an opening with a four-centred head leads to the Lady Chapel and there are similar openings on both sides of the sanctuary.

Several furnishings survive from the original church, including the altars in the side chapels—St Joseph and St Philip Bonizi on the north side and St Teresa of Lisieux on the south side—and the reredos on the high altar. These were probably designed by J S Hansom. The reredos was re-set by Mangan and separated from the original high altar, which does not appear to survive. The sanctuary furnishings and the stone font probably date from the 1980s. The benches in the nave are probably original.