Christ Church

Christ Church

A town church built in the centre of a square between 1840 and 1843 to designs by John Elliott of Chichester in lancet style, at a cost of approximately 4,500 pounds. The original design was amended following criticism from the Camden Society. The chancel was remodelled and refurbished in 1894. The church is constructed of flint with densely-packed galetting of flint flakes; some dressings are Caen stone, though the quoins are experimental artificial stone. Brick dressings were introduced during the 1894 phase. The roofs are slate. The inner tower walls are brick and the upper two stages are braced with timber.

The building comprises a four-stage west tower with clerestoried nave, lean-to north and south aisles, north and south transepts, and a chancel with a north organ chamber and south vestries.

The west tower has a freestone parapet above a corbelled cornice and angle buttresses which become diagonal on the upper two stages. Lancet windows are used throughout except for a Decorated style traceried west window. Steps lead up to the west doorway, which has a double chamfered arch. The tower was underpinned in 1907-8 under the supervision of Mr R Singer Hyde. The lean-to aisles are tall and narrow with angle buttresses and double chamfered lancet windows with hoodmoulds. Small paired lancet clerestory windows are set in square-headed frames. The transepts have large lancets in their west walls and stepped triple lancets in the north and south walls above doorways. The chancel has a three-light Decorated style traceried east window. The 1894 vestries and organ chamber are built to match the original style but have yellow brick dressings to the openings. On the south side is a polygonal vestry porch with a steep pyramidal roof, with an earlier nineteenth-century vestry existing behind later additions.

The interior is unusually tall and spacious. The arcade piers are slender octagonal forms of Caen stone with vertical recessed roll mouldings at the corners of each octagon, moulded capitals and double chamfered arches. The nave has a pitch pine tie beam, king post and strut roof with arched braces carried on short posts on moulded corbels and cusped detailing. The transept roofs are similar, while the aisle roofs are essentially one half of the same design. A moulded 1894 chancel arch on short shafts with moulded capitals separates the chancel, which has a roof of three hammerbeam trusses with cusped decoration.

The transepts contain galleries dating from 1865; the north gallery has raked seats, while the south gallery has been used as the organ chamber since 1971. A three-light 1894 internal west window with reticulated style tracery was inserted when the west gallery was removed. The nave retains a full set of benches with poppyhead finials, a rarity.

The 1894 chancel features a mosaic reredos with a frieze of mosaic foliage and text extending across the entire east wall and returning to north and south as a dado, with a mosaic sanctuary floor. Choir stalls with open traceried frontals date from 1894, with encaustic tiles laid to the chancel floor. A 1894 polygonal stone pulpit by Jones and Willis of London stands on a stone stem with carved stiff-leaf cornices and blind tracery and marble shafts to the sides. The font has a small octagonal bowl decorated with blind quatrefoils on a thick stem with trefoil-headed panels. A 1892 organ by J J Binns of Leeds was introduced in 1970. Oak panelling in the tower porch dates from 1929. The west window is by Bell of Bristol, dating from 1850. Cathedral glass from 1894 is present in the internal west window and aisles. Several nineteenth-century and later wall tablets and brasses are displayed.

Although sited in what was a fashionable part of Worthing, this finely detailed church was erected specifically for the accommodation of the poorer classes within an evangelical tradition. It is the first Gothic Revival church built in the town. Christ Church is an exemplary ambitious pre-archaeological Gothic style nineteenth-century church, preserving its original slender roofs and arcades and the full set of benches with poppyhead finials in the nave.