Hall, St James Church, 119 Constitution Street, Leith, Edinburgh

St James Church Hall, 119 Constitution Street, Leith, Edinburgh

This is a church hall of 1936–7, designed by D J Chisholm of the practice Dick Peddie, Todd & Jamieson, adjoining a small early gothic cruciform-plan church built in 1862–5. The church was designed by George Gilbert Scott with R Rowand Anderson as assistant. The complex also includes a separate church officer's house to the northwest.

The church is built in cream sandstone, squared and snecked rubble with polished dressings, featuring a base course, moulded cill course, sloping cills, offset gablet-capped buttresses, and roll-moulded pointed-arch principal openings with hoodmoulds. Lesser openings have chamfered reveals and boarded timber doorways with ornamental ironwork.

The narthex and west front comprise a 3-bay lean-to narthex spanning the centre of the west front with a gabled and finialled doorway to the centre, flanked by buttresses. The outer bays contain tripartite arcaded windows with foliate capitals to slender mullions, trefoiled heads and angel heads as label stops, with doorways on the returns. Above the narthex is a gabled and finialled elevation with 3 tall bipartite windows featuring quatrefoil plate tracery and a vesica with carved surround to the gablehead.

The south aisle has 3 tripartite windows with trefoiled plate tracery divided by buttresses. The north aisle contains 3 tripartite windows of stepped lancets divided by buttresses, with a canted vestry of 1881 in the re-entrant angle with the chancel. The two transepts are M-gabled with angle buttresses and windows detailed as the aisle windows, with secondary doorways featuring nook-shafts and carved label stops. An engaged tower rises in the re-entrant angle of the south transept and chancel. The chancel is 2 bays with a conical roof to a 3-bay apsidal east end.

The tower is 3-staged with angle buttresses. The heavy base features a lancet window to the east, small bipartite stair windows and a secondary doorway to the south, with an octagonal stair turret containing small windows beneath a half-pyramidal roof to the south. At the 2nd stage are 2 bipartite windows with quatrefoil plate tracery to the east and arrowslit windows above. The top stage has large louvred bipartite windows with nook-shafts and heavily moulded surrounds on all sides. An ashlar spire with fishscale carved corner pinnacles and 4 ashlar lucarnes crowns the tower, though the spire was truncated in 1977.

The church hall is single-storey, 5-bayed, built 1936–7 adjoining the vestry, with segmental-arched openings and a central doorpiece incorporating a late 16th-century inscribed stone. A polygonal projecting stone porch to the outer right has a segmental-arched doorway on the flank and a polygonal slate roof. The structure features a coped rubble parapet and slate piended roof, with small-pane metal windows with decorative border glazing and top hoppers.

Most windows throughout, where not replaced, contain leaded diamond panes. The roofing is black slate with stone ridge, moulded eaves gutter and gutterheads.

The interior is now disused. It is distinguished by an impressive wagon roof braced with lattice trusses rising from slender shafts. The chancel features a continuous pointed-arch arcade incorporating windows to the east, with blind panels painted with figures of saints in trefoil panels. Originally there was an extensive stained glass scheme, of which only the west window survives, executed by Clayton & Bell in 1865.

The church officer's house is 2-storey with the 1st floor partly in attic, an L-plan building with crowstepped gables, bipartite and tripartite windows with chamfered reveals, ashlar mullions and relieving arches over. A crowstepped stone porch with pointed-arch doorway and crowstepped dormer above is located on the south elevation. The windows are plate glass and 4-pane timber sash and case, beneath a slate roof.

The boundary comprises a low ashlar wall to the front, and octagonal ashlar gatepiers with pyramidal heads and cast-iron lamp standards, of which the right lamp standard is missing.