Church Of Saint Francis

Church of Saint Francis, Terriers

This church was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and built in 1929-30. It replaced a small wooden building erected in 1912 and a more substantial church proposed in 1916 but delayed by the First World War. The new parish of Terriers was created in 1937. The building cost £16,577 for the structure, with approximately £3,525 additional for architects' fees, fittings and organ. It was designed to accommodate 260 people.

The church is constructed of flint-faced walls with the flint embedded in concrete, with freestone dressings and pantile roofs. The plan comprises a nave with four-bay lean-to passage aisles, a western lean-to baptistry with projecting north and south porches, a crossing tower with short north and south transepts, and a sanctuary built over the boiler room and vestries.

The exterior employs a freely-treated late Gothic style. The design takes advantage of a steeply sloping site which falls away to the east, creating a towering east end to the church. At the west end, a tall blind wall to the nave rises behind the baptistry, which is flanked by a pair of projecting porches covered by hipped roofs with minimalist battlementing. The baptistry has a pair of plain three-light square-headed windows. The porches each have west-facing doorways with ogee heads above square lintels. The low aisles feature almost continuous six-light square-headed windows with cusped lights. The nave walls above are blind with no clerestory. The transepts contain very tall three-light windows with segmental arched heads and depressed reticulated tracery. The sanctuary windows have two lights and are cusped with unusual crocketed tracery. At the east end, the sanctuary wall is blind except for two two-light square-headed windows lighting the vestries. The crossing tower has clasping pilaster buttresses and a shallow pyramidal roof, with a north-east rounded stair-turret featuring a vertical line of small windows. The belfry windows are of two lights with scalloped arches and crocketed pinnacles, divided by a pilaster.

The interior is outstanding for its subtle use of light, culminating in brightness at the crossing and sanctuary. The plastered walls are painted white with plain glass in the windows. The aisles and nave are divided by four-bay arcades with piers of rectangular section and rounded corners, the arch mouldings dying into the piers. The nave is very tall with an unpainted and unstained arch-braced A-frame roof with king-posts, the braces carried on wall-posts on moulded corbels. Five sets of purlins in the roof have vertical plain boarding behind. The sanctuary roof is similar. The aisle roofs are of lean-to construction, also unpainted and unstained. A secondary timber ceiling over the crossing somewhat diminishes the intended effect. The arches around the crossing are tall with respond shafts, moulded bell capitals and bases.

The principal focus at the east end is a tall textile reredos hung from a wooden cornice decorated with pairs of gilded angels. The sanctuary's side windows are recessed behind enclosing super-arches. The elegant choir stalls have shaped ends with two tiers of small piercings in the frontals. The nave seating consists of chairs. The font, located in the west baptistry, has a polygonal bowl with a carved frieze on a stout tapering base with hollow chamfered facets. The pulpit is conventional and polygonal, with pierced tracery panels to the sides, mounted on a stone base. Original recesses for radiators and slit vents appear in the aisle walls under the window sills. The crossing and sanctuary flooring is lozenge-patterned oilcloth dating from the 1980s, while the nave has plainer oilcloth flooring. The organ, installed in the 1980s, is sited in the north transept with the console in the south transept; the original organ was also placed in the north transept.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960) was the grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott, the most successful church architect of the nineteenth century. Scott was articled from 1899 to Temple Moore, England's leading church architect between approximately 1895 and 1914. He commenced practice in 1903 after winning the competition for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral at the age of 22. He worked in partnership with his younger brother Adrian. He was knighted in 1924, won the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1925, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1944. The church was selected by the widow of Reverend Frederick Francis Field, who had initiated the project in 1916. St Francis' church is considered one of Scott's best works.