Portaferry Presbyterian Church, Meeting House Street, Portaferry, Co Down, BT22 1LD

Portaferry Presbyterian Church is a two-storey Doric temple-style Presbyterian church of 1840–41, designed by the Belfast architect John Millar (c.1776–c.1856). It is widely recognised as one of the most important Greek neo-classical buildings in Ulster and has been described by the late Sir Charles Brett as "one of the treasures of Ulster architecture." The listing covers the church itself together with its gates, gate piers, and railings. It stands within a conservation area.

The building replaced an earlier mid-18th century Presbyterian church on the same site, which was rendered unfit by the "Great Wind" of January 1839. Construction cost £1,999, and the church was formally opened by the Reverend Henry Cooke in September 1841, though minor works to the grounds continued sporadically until 1847. The choice of the Classical style is thought to have been influenced by the preferences of the local minister, the Reverend John Orr, and by members of the congregation, many of whom had attended the Reverend William Steel Dickson's Classical School, established in Portaferry in 1780.

John Millar had previously worked as an assistant to Thomas Hopper and was involved in the building of Gosford Castle, County Armagh. He designed several churches in the Greek Revival style, notably the Presbyterian churches in Antrim (1833–37) and Castlereagh (1834–5), but Portaferry is undoubtedly his finest achievement.

The building sits on the south-west side of the narrow Meeting House Lane, off Portaferry town square, where it stands like a large, bright, solid block, dwarfing its neighbours. In architectural terms it is an amphi-prostyle hexastyle Greek temple set upon a battered podium. It is a plain rendered two-storey gabled structure, with a hexastyle portico to both the north-west and south-east elevations. A full entablature encircles the entire structure, and each gable is finished with a pediment. The triglyphs, guttae, and metopes are rendered in simple, plain block form — unadorned and abstracted from the classical model — a deliberate interpretive choice by Millar that anticipates more modern classicism.

The distinctive Doric columns of the hexastyle fronts are derived from those of the Temple of Apollo at Delos, as recorded by James "Athenian" Stuart and Nicholas Revett during their visit to Greece in the 1750s and published in Volume III of their Antiquities of Athens (1794). These columns are also found at the Portico of Thoricus in Attica, discovered in 1812, and at the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous. They are distinguished by having plain, unfluted shafts except at the base and just below the capitals, where short flutes appear. This reflects the ancient Greek practice of beginning columns in this manner before completing the fluting, and the order is consequently sometimes referred to as the "unfinished order." Nicholas Revett had used this order for the first time since antiquity on the portico at Standlynch (now Trafalgar House) in Wiltshire (c.1766), and later on the open colonnades of his church at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire (1778–9). Millar himself first used it at his Presbyterian church in Antrim of 1833–37, and employed it again here at Portaferry.

Millar also applied entasis to his columns — the subtly convex curved swelling in the column's profile from base to top. Remarkably, Stuart and Revett and other 18th century authorities were unaware of entasis in classical architecture, even though at some temples, such as Paestum, it is visually obvious. Although Allasion first published a paper on the subject in 1814–15, it was C.R. Cockerell, Haller von Hallerstein, and Linckh who appear to have been the first to recognise entasis in Greek architecture. John Millar, at Portaferry, was undoubtedly among the very first architects to consciously employ it.

While the columns derive from the Temple of Apollo at Delos, the general form of the building owes much to the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (built around 420 BC), which had been published in 1816. That temple also uses the same type of plain columns with incipient fluting at base and top. However, Millar did not simply copy the published drawings. At Portaferry he confined his columns to the front and rear only, rather than continuing them along the long sides as in the Temple of Nemesis. To light the church interior, he pierced the side walls with tall plain window openings, each separated by square pilasters that read as square columns, echoing the rhythmical flow of vertical columns along the flanks of a classical Greek temple.

The tapered, storey-height columns, showing entasis, rest on top of the ground floor. The lower storey was designed as a battered podium — a feature of classical Greek architecture thought originally to derive from Egypt — which supports the temple above. The site rises sharply to the north-west, making the ground floor semi-basement on that side. To the south-east the lower ground level allows the two outer columns of the portico to rest on battered corner bases that are separate from the main base. The open portions created by these separate bases give access to smaller doorways into the church, one to each side. Between the two central columns on the south-east elevation there is a small projection resembling a miniature temple, which provides space for the narrow stair by which the minister reaches the pulpit.

The building's main entrance is to the north-east side of the north-west portico, reached via steps leading into a porch set between the columns. This entrance leads to the gallery and has relatively plain panelled timber double doors whose panels echo the tapered shape of the portico columns. Above door level, the spaces between the columns are enclosed to form the front and rear porches, with a plain rendered wall and glazing above. Claims by various authors that both ends were glazed for the first time in 1907 are not correct; close examination of the building leaves little doubt that Millar's original design included glazed sections at each end, for which there are precedents — for example, Schinkel's proposed scheme for glazing in the portico of the Neue Wache in Berlin. There is also a smaller ground-level entrance to the south-east face of the base of the steps.

The longer south-west and north-east facades are largely identical, with four tall upper-level windows aligned with four much smaller ground-level windows. The upper windows have hopper openings for ventilation. All these windows were renewed in the 1930s with leaded and coloured glass in simple geometric and floral patterning. The battered portico base to the south-east has two small ground-floor windows, matching those on the south-west and north-east elevations. The roof is covered in Bangor blue slate with cast-iron ogee gutters and square downspouts.

In the interior, Millar used at each end an unusual form of the Ionic order derived from that employed in the cella of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in Arcadia. Stuart and Revett were unaware of this order; it was discovered and recorded by the classicist Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863) in 1811–12 during his expedition to Greece, undertaken with the archaeologist Haller von Hallerstein and the English architect John Foster. While Cockerell was largely responsible for Volume IV of the Antiquities of Athens (published in 1830), it was not until 1860 that he published the detailed results of his survey of the Bassae temple in his work The Temples of Jupiter Panhellenius at Aegina and Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. Millar, who never visited Greece, clearly studied drawings of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae — whose frieze is in the British Museum — and first used the order at the Presbyterian church at Castlereagh (1834–5) before employing it at Portaferry. Millar appears to have been the first architect since the ancients to use this order. Cockerell himself later used it at the Ashmolean Museum portico and the Taylorian Institute in Oxford (1841–45) and at the University of Cambridge Library (1837–41).

The building is surrounded on two sides by wrought-iron spear railings on a low rendered wall interspersed with plain square piers.

Regarding later alterations: at some point in the 20th century the church was painted, apparently in response to a damp problem, though when this first occurred has not been established. The present painted surface, which incorporates pink columns, dates from a scheme carried out in the 1990s, when two trees were also removed from the ground to the rear of the building. The church was first wired for electricity and a new organ installed after the First World War. At the same time, two large stained glass windows commemorating those who fell in the First World War were added (1925–26), while the gallery windows were replaced in the mid-1930s. Various minor alterations were carried out in the latter half of the 20th century, including the laying of carpets, installation of a new heating system, enlargement of the choir enclosure, and the addition of a new communion table and lectern.

Around 2002 a small independent charitable trust, the Friends of Portaferry Presbyterian Church, was established, involving members of the congregation and others. Working in co-operation with the congregation, the trust seeks to foster renewed interest in and appreciation of the church as a work of architecture. Concerts have been held at which choirs and musicians of international standing have performed. In June 2009 the Friends brought together a gathering of over 100 people with a panel of distinguished architectural historians for "A Celebration of the Architecture of Portaferry Presbyterian Church and the Greek Revival."