East Cliff United Reform Church and Attached Sunday School/Lecture Hall is a Grade II listed building in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole local planning authority area, England. First listed on 10 November 1987. Church. 1 related planning application.

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

WRENN ID
dusk-shingle-rain
Grade
II
Local Planning Authority
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
Constituency
Bournemouth East MP: Tom Hayes (Lab)
Country
England
Date first listed
10 November 1987
Type
Church
Address
East Cliff United Reform Church and Attached Sunday School/Lecture Hall, Holdenhurst Road, BH8 8AW
OS grid reference
SZ 098 917
Coordinates
50.7257, -1.86189
Source
Historic England listing

Also on this page: related consents · flood risk · radon risk · weather exposure · detailed attributes ↓

Description

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.

Local climate

East Cliff United Reform Church and Attached Sunday School/Lecture Hall receives an average of 870 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 62% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is greater than that of 87% of listed buildings.

It experiences an average of 7 freeze-thaw cycles a year, fewer than 96% of listed buildings. Of these, 3 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.

Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.

More on this building

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  • No EPC on record for this property
  • No sale records on file
  • Related listed building consents — 1 application
  • Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
  • Flood risk assessment
  • Radon risk assessment
  • Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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