Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church, 356 Ravenhill Road, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT6 8GL

Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church is a symmetrical, free-standing, double-height redbrick church dating from 1969, designed by local architect Gordon McKnight and built by contractors McCarroll and Steenson of Belfast. Its foundation stones were laid on 14th October 1967 and the building opened on 4th October 1969. Rectangular in plan and facing west, it occupies a corner site on the east side of Ravenhill Road, between Ravenhill Gardens to the north and Ardenlee Avenue to the south. The listing covers the church itself together with its gates and railings.

EXTERIOR

The main body of the church is constructed in redbrick laid in stretcher bond, with a splayed redbrick plinth at the base. The roof is flat concrete with a metal lining, set back behind a concrete clerestory featuring arched window openings. Rainwater is discharged through lead-lined concrete spouts, with steel box hoppers and box guttering.

Segmental-headed window openings throughout are fitted with fixed-pane steel windows with steel sills.

The symmetrical west-facing front elevation is dominated by a triple-height gabled entrance projection with a pitched roof and stepped concrete verge. At the centre of this projection is a cast concrete rose window, above which is an applied metal clock face, and below which bronze lettering reads "Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church." At ground-floor level, the projection opens into three segmental-headed double-height arched openings forming a prostyle tetrastyle portico — that is, a projecting porch with four columns across its front — set on a terrazzo stepped platform. To either side of the portico, at ground-floor level, are seven slender loophole-style window openings with steel windows and steel sills. The vestibule is flat-roofed and abuts the gabled projection on both sides; across both cheeks of the vestibule run forty-two slender window openings of the same detailing, lighting the stairhalls.

Within the portico, a full-height hardwood-framed glazed screen contains three square-headed door openings with deep hardwood architrave surrounds. These are fitted with double-leaf bronze doors bearing raised lettering quoting from Christian texts: one door carries a text from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and the central doors bear the fourteen theses of Martin Luther that gave rise to the Reformation.

The double-height north side elevation has eleven segmental-headed window openings at ground level, detailed as described above. The south side elevation matches the north.

The rear elevation features a recessed triple-height gable mirroring the front, also with a cast concrete rose window. It is abutted by a two-storey flat-roofed wing connecting the church to the later hall. To either side of this rear gable are three triangular projections, and a single segmental-headed door opening sits to either side of the gable.

A three-storey redbrick hall, built around 1997 and named the Paisley Jubilee Complex, is connected to the rear of the church.

SETTING

The front doors open onto the terrazzo platform and into a cobblelock forecourt enclosed on three sides by geometric steel railings and gates mounted on a low redbrick plinth wall with redbrick piers.

INTERIOR

The church was designed to seat 2,000 people. The pulpit was arranged, in the words of the Rev. Paisley, so that no one in the lower gallery would be more than 50 feet from him, and no one in the upper gallery more than 70 feet away. The interior was fitted with light wood pews and the building was centrally heated and carpeted at the time of opening. Around the walls are likenesses of thirty Protestant martyrs, beginning with Luther, Calvin and John Knox, and including a young Belgian missionary who was murdered in the Congo. A plaque records that the church was built by the Ravenhill congregation under the ministry of Dr Ian K. Paisley in recognition of his evangelistic labours and defence of the faith.

HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

At the time of its opening, the church was claimed to be the largest Protestant church opened in the United Kingdom since the turn of the century. The opening ceremony attracted 6,000 people, some of whom followed the service via closed-circuit television. The building cost £180,000 — the equivalent of nearly two million pounds today — with £120,000 already paid by the time it opened, all raised by free subscription. Press reports made much of its scale and the fact that it was centrally heated and carpeted.

The site was purchased from the Bates family; Sir Dawson Bates had been the first Minister of Home Affairs in Northern Ireland. The Ravenhill Road location is also close to the former home of Dr Henry Cooke, another significant and controversial figure in the history of Irish Presbyterianism, who is commemorated by a church on the nearby Ormeau Road.

The building is inextricably linked with the Rev. Dr Ian Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. Paisley, the son of a Baptist pastor, felt the call to preach while working on farms in Ballymena. He completed a three-year diploma at the Theological Hall of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland and further study at a Bible college in Wales, before beginning to preach at an Evangelical Mission Church at Ravenhill to a congregation that had seceded from the Presbyterian Church in the 1930s. He was ordained there in late 1946. Following a dispute in 1951, when the Down Presbytery refused permission for Paisley — then aged 26 — to conduct an evangelical campaign at Lissara church hall in Crossgar, he was joined by elders and members of the Crossgar congregation, conducted a campaign in a neighbouring mission hall, and formed the first congregation of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. His own Ravenhill church joined a month later, followed by a third congregation at Cabra, County Antrim. By the 1961 census, 1,093 people gave their denomination as Free Presbyterian. Several new churches were added during the 1950s, some following successful tent meetings held by Paisley. By early 1969 there were twelve Free Presbyterian churches in Northern Ireland, most of them small mission-hall-type buildings. Before Martyrs Memorial opened, Paisley's Sunday services were held in the Ulster Hall, which was usually filled to capacity. By the late 1960s, as Paisley had begun to move into the political sphere, he was estimated to have around 200,000 supporters.

The church first appears on the Ordnance Survey map edition from the 1960s and 1970s, and entered the valuation records in 1970 as a "Church, Hall, caretaker's house and grounds," with buildings valued at £2,400.

ARCHITECT

Gordon McKnight began his career as a church architect with Orangefield Presbyterian Church (1955–57) and went on to design over thirty churches for Protestant denominations across four decades. His other works include St Andrews and Knockbreda Church in Belfast (1971) and Albertbridge Road Congregational Church (1985–86). His "blend of tradition and modernity, often wrought in romantic vein" made him a popular choice for church commissions.