The Radcliffe Centre

The Radcliffe Centre is a nonconformist church and Sunday school, built in 1857 by Foster and Wood of Bristol. It was enlarged between 1876 and 1879 with the addition of a classroom range, and converted into lecture hall classrooms and dwellings in 1982. The building is constructed of squared Cosgrove limestone rubble with Bath stone dressings and slate roofs.

The architectural style is Early English. The main church building is rectangular, with a central gabled porch featuring double doors and a richly decorated doorway with shafts and a hood mould. Flanking the porch are stair turrets, and to the right is an attached classroom range of irregular plan. The front of the building has 4-light windows with cusped heads and offset gabled buttresses. A principal chapel window above the porch consists of three lancets with elaborate Geometrical tracery. Internal features include a hammer-beam roof, a gallery at the entrance, and arcades on both sides with circular piers on octagonal bases. An organ dating from 1799, housed in a mahogany case of Gothick style, is also present. Two wall monuments, made of white marble on slate grounds, commemorate the Reverend Enoch Barling (minister 1818-32) and Deacon Stephen Webb (died 1852, with an extract from his funeral sermon). The Barling monument was relocated from 'The Old Meeting House' following a union of congregations in 1850. Originally a Congregational church, the building was later converted by the University of Buckingham and reopened in 1982. The classroom range steps down St Rumbold's Lane, and features a canted stone bay, dormer, stone stack, mullion windows with cusped heads, and a low cross wing. The stair turrets have doorways with hoodmoulds and polygonal upper storeys with single-light windows.