Parish Church Of Christ Church

The parish church of Christ Church, Torquay, was built between 1868 and 1907, with designs by Habershon, Brock, and Webb, and later additions by Tait and Harvey (1907) and Richards and Harrison (1889). The church is constructed of snicked local grey limestone rubble with freestone dressings, and has a slate roof.

The church comprises a chancel, nave, a four-bay south aisle, a south-west tower incorporating a porch, a north-east vestry and a south-east chapel. The south side features a buttressed aisle with a lean-to roof and two-light, Geometric Decorated-style traceried windows. The west tower is three-stage, square on plan up to the bottom stage, with a south-east stair turret containing a moulded south doorway with stiff-leaf capitals, a gabled hood mould, an original boarded door with ironwork, and lancet windows above. The belfry stage has canted corners, louvred lancet windows with stone battering below tall lucarnes, and a stone spire. The south-east chapel is built of snecked ashlar with diagonal buttresses, a parapet, a hipped roof, and trefoil-headed, one-light windows, one to the south side and two to the east. The chancel, finished in the same masonry as the chapel, has moulded string courses, angle buttresses, and a central buttress to the east wall, with a five-light Geometric Decorated traceried east window. The north side of the nave has Geometric Decorated traceried windows.

Inside, the chancel arch is moulded and features text in Lombardic script. The chancel roof is boarded and keeled, with moulded ribs and carved bosses. The unusually tall nave has a distinctive roof with five and a half bays, incorporating intermediate trusses braced in an arch fashion from queen posts, supporting a scissor-braced apex with braces to both the purlins and principal rafters. Intermediate trusses are also arch-braced from king posts. All trusses spring from stone corbels. The four-bay south arcade features slender cast-iron columns with quatrefoil sections and wrought-iron capitals, supporting thick, chamfered arches via an iron plate. A west end gallery is glazed with elaborate Gothic front. The chancel has two-bay arcades into the side chapels, with cylindrical columns and moulded arches. There are sedilia with a traceried segmental arch and a pendant. The church fittings include a timber, blind traceried reredos, a Purbeck marble ashlar chancel screen, an octagonal pulpit with pierced roundels, and a font with a small bowl on a slender stem. A 1918 war memorial window is likely by Hugh Easton.