St Malachy's Church, 24 Alfred Street, Belfast, Co. Antrim, BT2 8EN

St Malachy's Roman Catholic Church, Alfred Street, Belfast

St Malachy's is a freestanding, double-height Tudor Gothic Revival Roman Catholic church, constructed between 1841 and 1844 to designs by Belfast-based architect Thomas Jackson (1807–1890). It occupies a prominent city centre location at the corner of Alfred Street and Russell Street, within Belfast's Linen Conservation Area, and is cruciform in plan with diminished gabled projections to the north and south. The listing extends to the church itself, together with its gates, railings and boundary wall.

Exterior

The walls are built in red brick laid in Flemish bond over a deep moulded sandstone plinth, with a string course between floors; all dressings are in ashlar Giffnock sandstone. The pitched natural slate roofs are concealed behind castellated sandstone parapets over a moulded sandstone string with saddleback coping. Gables are terminated by clover-leaf cross finials. Cast-iron rainwater goods include box hoppers dated 1842. The principal gables are terminated by octagonal turrets divided by string courses and rising to tall castellated sandstone belfry stages, each facet punctuated with lancet openings and having a quatrefoil frieze. The remaining corners are terminated by angle buttresses with offsets, rising to gableted pinnacles.

Ground-floor windows are mullioned, cusped-headed, leaded and stained glass — generally replacements — set in square-headed surrounds with label moulds. Gallery-level windows are transomed and mullioned with cusped pointed arches and hood moulds. The principal gable windows are large pointed openings with slender perpendicular tracery. All doors are pointed-arched, panelled and studded timber, some with glazed transoms, set within square-headed rebated surrounds with spandrels and label moulds; they are generally accessed by bull-nosed sandstone steps.

The principal elevation faces west and is three windows wide to either side of the principal gabled porch. The main entrance is accessed by four Mourne granite steps and is surmounted by a single window and a rose window to the apex. The main window is flanked in its upper reaches by two cartouches: that to the left bears the Diocesan crest; that to the right bears the Denvir crest. The cheeks of the porch each have a door with a window over — the southern one is now accessed by a modern disabled access ramp. The north elevation is a single window wide to either side of a full-height gabled projection, one bay deep with entrances at ground floor. The gable has a window to each floor. All remaining gables are similarly detailed, each bearing a dated crest (A.D. MDCCCXLII) and a small roundel to the apex.

The east elevation is broadly similar in form to the west, with some differences and later abutments. To the right of the central gable, the ground floor is abutted by a flat-roofed sacristy extension lit by four simple cusped windows in plain stone architraves, with a similar window to the north. The east gable has a double-leaf door of four Gothic panels with a tall came-light transom, set in an ordered surround as elsewhere but with integral side lights and a continuous label mould. The south gable cheek has a single door with a small rectangular window over and a single bipartite window to its right. In place of the two ground-floor windows immediately to the left of the main gable are two diminutive canted abutments housing side chapels, each lit by simple cusped windows to the cheeks. The east gable is topped by a belfry tower — formerly with a spire, subsequently removed — comprising a battered, weather-slated polygonal plinth topped by a Gothic fretted stone belfry of cusped and quatrefoil openings, crowned with a quatrefoil frieze and castellated parapet. The south elevation mirrors the north.

Interior

The interior is of exceptional quality and unique in the context of Northern Ireland. It follows a non-conformist layout and features a magnificent pendant fan-vaulted ceiling modelled in imitation of Henry VII's Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The interior was designed in a similar Tudor style to the exterior by Peter Lundy, who carried out the work between 1842 and 1844. The lavish decoration was made possible by a donation of £3,000 from a Captain Thomas Griffith, commemorated by a memorial in the entrance porch.

The Telford church organ was installed in the 1850s. The altar centrepiece and portrait of St Malachy were painted by Felix Piccione, an Austrian-Italian artist. The church was extensively renovated in 1926, when the current marble altar, pulpit and sanctuary rails were added, along with the mosaic sanctuary floor. The architect of this work is not recorded, though it has been suggested that it closely resembles work by Padraig Gregory, who also designed the Lourdes Shrine in the porch in 1932. In the 1980s the altar was set back into a recess, leaving Piccione's reredos paintings undisturbed.

The most recent restoration, carried out by Consarc Conservation, included repair of the exterior stonework, rebuilding of the eroded stone towers, repair of the stained glass windows, restoration of the original statues, retiling of the main floor, and the design of new pews.

Historical Background

Jackson won a competition to design the church, beating thirteen other entries with his Tudor Revival design. He was responsible only for the exterior, which cost £5,679. The foundation stone was laid on 3 November 1841 — the Feast of St Malachy — and the exterior was completed in 1842, as several external date stones confirm. The belfry tower was a later addition, built in 1868; prior to that date the church bell had been housed in the front-left turret.

The church was built in response to significant pressure on Catholic places of worship in Belfast. At the time of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, only the churches of St Patrick and St Mary had been built in the town; together they could accommodate around 10,000 worshippers, yet the Catholic population was estimated at 30,000. The Bishop of the Diocese, Dr Denvir, purchased a plot of land to the south-east of Belfast town centre — land that had recently been reclaimed from the River Lagan by the construction of a dam — from Lord Donegall.

The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1832–33 shows the site at the very edge of the town, bordered largely by rural land to the south. By the time of the second edition map of 1858, the church appears as a cruciform structure described as "St Malachy's R.C. Chapel." The sacristan's house to the north was constructed around 1858, and the Presbytery to the south was built in 1869 by O'Neill and Byrne Architects.

The church was first recorded in the Annual Revisions in 1863, when it was valued at £350 on land let from Messrs Adam and Andrew Thomas McClean. This value held until 1906, by which time the church had been purchased outright and revalued at £525. By the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935 the value had risen to £800, and by the second revaluation of 1956 it had increased markedly to £1,680, reflecting both inflation and the addition of a rear church hall. Under the 1957 Rent and Valuation Act the value was reduced to £1,344, rising again to £1,464 by the end of the 1972 revaluation.

During the Second World War an incendiary bomb landed on the roof, shattering the original glazing. After the war, the damaged windows and oak frames to the north, west and south were replaced with new glazing imported from Germany. In 1973 the eastern wall was replastered, during which work a decayed load-bearing oak beam above the high altar — weighing three tonnes — was discovered and subsequently encased in a steel support. Several of the stained glass windows installed in 1945 were later destroyed during a period of civil unrest and replaced.

Setting

The church occupies an urban setting generally surrounded by dense development dating from the late 19th and 20th centuries. It is set back slightly from the street and surrounded by tarmacadamed hard standings. The site is bounded to the north, east and west by a tall brick perimeter wall, and to the west by cast-iron gates, railings and octagonal sandstone piers, all supported on a Newry Granodiorite plinth. The piers are detailed with cusped lancet recesses, a quatrefoil frieze and ornate floriated carving to the caps, which are topped by curly cast-iron finials. To the north is the sacristan's house, a single-storey dwelling, formerly of two bays with a Gothic entrance porch and pitched natural slate roof, now extended. To the south is St Malachy's Presbytery. On the nearby Sussex Place are St Malachy's Convent and the former National School. The church shares group value with the Presbytery. Much of the terraced housing and Victorian warehousing that formerly surrounded the church has been demolished, greatly improving its setting.