East Cliff United Reform Church And Attached Sunday School/Lecture Hall

The East Cliff United Reform Church, originally a Congregational church, was built between 1878 and 1879 by architects Kemp Welch and Pinder, with additions made from 1889 to 1891 by Lawson and Donkin. The church features grey-buff brick with stone dressings and a 20th-century concrete tile roof. It is a five-bay structure that includes a south aisle, a north-west tower, and a west porch. At the east end, there is an added cross-wing that incorporates an apse, and further east is another wider cross-wing that housed the former Sunday School on the ground floor and a Lecture Hall (now a flat) above. The design combines Romanesque and Cinquecento styles, featuring Cinquecento windows under hoodmoulds, with full-height windows on the north and south elevations that have thick transoms at gallery level. The gables are adorned with lombard friezes. The west end of the church has a gabled porch with a pair of round-arched doorways beneath a relieving arch, flanked by two Cinquecento windows and a wheel window above. The projecting gabled south aisle has a subsidiary porch with a window above it. The north-west tower features similar windows and Romanesque intersecting arcading, a clock stage, and a recessed timber polygonal cupola topped with a leaded dome.

Inside, the church boasts a fine contemporary interior with a U-shaped gallery supported by scallop-capitalled columns, featuring a leaf-decorated S-section balustrade. There is a secondary gallery across the north-east angle filled with later coloured glass. A triple-columned arch leads to the apse, which has a round-arched arcade, a ribbed semi-dome, and a circular top-light. Below the organ pipes is a decorative bressumer, and the timber roof trusses are notable for their posts and braces that create a series of arches with cusping in the spandrels. The church also contains panelled pews and early 20th-century coloured glass in the windows.

A Minister's house that once adjoined the east end of the building was demolished around 1985.