Sherwell Church And Associated Buildings Including Shelly Hall

Sherwell Church and associated buildings including Shelly Hall, North Hill, Plymouth

A Congregational church designed in 1864 by the Manchester architects Aycliffe and Paul. The building is constructed of dressed and coursed Plymouth limestone with lighter-coloured ashlar dressings, beneath a plain tile roof with chamfered stone coped gables. The architectural style is Middle Pointed Gothic.

The church is planned as a hall church with galleries on three sides, transepts positioned at the western (ritual east) end, and a two-storey porch to the south of the eastern end. A tower rises to the north of the eastern end. Associated with the church are a hall and Sunday school to the north, and a caretaker's cottage.

The exterior features two-storey elevations throughout. All walls are decorated with ashlar banding and polychrome voussoirs to the openings, with delicate early Decorated style tracery to the windows. The eastern entrance front is gabled and features a five-light window above a three-bay entrance flanked by offset corner buttresses. The pointed arches over these openings rest on marble shafts with foliate capitals, with foliate stops to the hoodmoulds. The central doorway contains a quatrefoil set within the tympanum above a trumeau and is flanked by trefoil-headed lancets with quatrefoil tracery.

The gabled eastern front is flanked on the left by a two-storey porch with pyramidal roof and on the right by a tall tower reaching 135 feet, topped with a stone spire. These structures are fronted by slender turrets with angle roofs set behind parapets, each turret having two cusped windows and each lean-to behind the parapets having a cusped lancet window to the front. The porch tower features a horizontal weathering line dividing the two stages, with a traceried single-light window to the upper stage, an entablature and bracketed cornice. The main tower has three stages with offset buttresses; the second stage has paired traceried lights and the upper stage has louvred two-light traceried windows. The fine two-tier spire is decorated with lucarnes and topped by a turned finial. The spire sits above an entablature with brackets and symbols of the Four Evangelists.

The southern elevation is arranged as 1:4:1 bays. A buttressed gabled transept on the left features a four-light window above a pair of two-light windows. To the right of this is a buttressed aisle with two-light windows above pairs of lancets, and a porch on the far right with a two-light window above a pointed-arched doorway with a trefoil in the tympanum. The hall has a gable-end buttressed front with a gable trefoil above a three-light window, over a gabled porch with corner buttresses and a segmental arched doorway.

The taller Sunday school gable end behind the hall features a central quatrefoil. The roof is surmounted by a steep pyramidal ventilator with timber trefoil-headed arches framing louvred openings. Side walls have plain pointed-arched transomed windows. A tall chateau-style roof crowns a tall stair tower which dominates the angle where the schoolroom meets the church. All windows throughout contain leaded glass, and doorways retain their original planked doors. The level of architectural detail is consistently high across all elevations.

The interior has not been fully inspected, but is noted as having paired cast-iron columns supporting the galleries and contains 19th-century stained glass. The church was noted by contemporaries as the first example of a West Country church to be built in the Gothic style, representing a significant achievement of accomplished architectural design by a well-known Manchester firm.