Church Of The Holy Saviour

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SAVIOUR, WESTBURY LEIGH

The Church of the Holy Saviour is a Victorian country church built in stages between 1876 and 1890, designed by William White, a leading architect of the Gothic Revival. The building is constructed of honey-coloured limestone rubble with ashlar facing, and has tiled roofs.

The church comprises a nave, two-bay chancel with narrow vestry and organ chamber to the north, and a two-bay south aisle with a tower at its west end. The south aisle is now partitioned off with a kitchen below and meeting room above. The exterior is modest in character, with a short nave and south aisle, a slightly lower chancel, and a south porch. The tower is short with low buttresses on the south and west sides, unbuttressed in its upper parts. It features louvred two-light bell openings and a small pyramidal cap roof set behind a solid parapet. The window tracery throughout is in mixed styles, some Perpendicular in character but not following medieval precedent.

The nave, which now serves as a community hall, has bare stone walls and an open timber roof of complex design—a carefully considered variation on a tie-beam and scissor-brace arrangement. A two-arched arcade opens to the south aisle, with arches that die into the walls at the outside and into a square pier at the centre, which rests in turn on a sturdy circular column with foliate capital. The mouldings and transitions are highly individual and carefully managed. The moulded chancel arch springs from corbels. A new timber floor was laid during the 1999-2000 conversion.

The principal fixtures include a reredos of probably early twentieth-century date depicting the Crucifixion in a gilded rectangular frame with arched centre. The chancel retains Victorian open benches shortened from original nave pews. Nineteenth-century stained glass of unknown maker appears in the east window and nave. Two simple war memorial tablets are mounted on the nave north wall: one of marble dating to around 1919, and one of cut stone dating to around 1945. The 1999-2000 reordering removed the wooden pulpit, stone font, and original nave and aisle seating. Stained and painted partitions and folding doors now divide the south aisle and chancel from the nave.

The nave and chancel were completed first and opened on Advent Sunday 1877 as a chapel of ease to Westbury parish church, at a cost of £2,584. The south aisle was added in 1888-9. William White's plans submitted to the Incorporated Church Building Society in April 1875 prove the aisle was intended from the outset and also show the outline of a north aisle that was never constructed. The tower was added in 1890 by Mrs Phipps as a memorial to her husband, Leckonby Hathersall Phipps.

Until the 1850s, Westbury Leigh was served by two Baptist chapels, while Anglicans travelled to either Westbury parish church or Dilton Marsh. From 1855 church services were held in a schoolroom. By 1875 plans were being drawn up and fundraising commenced in 1876.

By the 1990s the church had become cold, damp, and underused. A community-led millennium project converted the nave, aisle, and tower to a community centre, with the chancel retained as a place of worship. The conversion, completed in 1999-2000, was designed by Peter Swann, a retired local architect.

William White (1825-1900) was a leading architect of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Born in Northamptonshire, he was the great-nephew of the naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne. He trained in Leamington Spa under D.G. Squirhill and from 1845-7 was an assistant to George Gilbert Scott. He subsequently established an independent practice in Truro and became highly successful as a church architect in the south-west. White returned to London in 1852 following his commission for All Saints, Notting Hill. He was a friend of pioneering Gothic revivalists G.E. Street and G.F. Bodley, and an exponent of High Victorian Gothic which he helped develop in the 1850s and 1860s, making extensive use of brick and polychrome. He was also interested in technical innovation and experimented with concrete in the early 1870s. White was closely involved with the Ecclesiological Society, developing his own theories of design proportion and maintaining a general concern for the proper arrangement of churches. He also designed schools, parsonages, and country houses.