North Morningside Church, Morningside Road, Edinburgh

North Morningside Church, Morningside Road, Edinburgh

Designed by David Robertson in 1879, with internal alterations by Groves Raines Architects in 1994 and 2000, North Morningside Church is a large Romanesque aisled church with attached church hall and vestry. The building is orientated towards the south with a north-west tower.

The exterior is constructed of grey sandstone, squared and snecked rubble with ashlar dressings. The design features a base course, pendant corbel table at the eaves, round-arched moulded openings set on block imposts, and buttresses with sawtooth ashlar pyramidal coping. Pinnacles accent the roofline.

The north elevation, which serves as the entrance (liturgically the west), is dominated by a finialled gable and tower to the right. The central entrance features a deeply chamfered doorway with chevron carving and colonnettes with scalloped capitals. A small blind opening sits in the gablehead above. The timber door is fitted with decorative cast-iron hinges, and a small tripartite window is set in a semi-circular timber fanlight. Cast-iron lamp standards and railings flank the entrance steps. The doorway is flanked by a bipartite window to the right and a tripartite window to the left, arranged beneath a row of blind intersecting arcading. Above this sits a tall stepped and hoodmoulded tripartite window with nook-shafts and chevron carving to the arches. A blind oculus with decorative carved moulding and hoodmould appears in the gablehead. A small gabled stair hall projects on the return to the left, with bipartite windows at ground and first-floor levels, a stepped string course above the ground floor, and an oculus in the gablehead.

The tower comprises four stages with offset angle buttresses and a battered base. The first stage features a further cross-finialled gabled entrance on the west face, detailed identically to the main entrance, and two windows beneath blind arcading on the north face. The second stage has two nook-shafted windows on the north and west faces and a single window to the south, with a pendant corbel table above. The third stage contains a tall transomed narrow stair window facing south, north, and west. The top stage is lit by louvred tripartite windows on each face and is topped with a saw-tooth pyramidal ashlar roof crowned with a cross finial.

The nave and chancel comprise a five-bay nave with a lower single-bay chancel. Low side aisles with lean-to roofs run the length, each bay containing a single window divided by buttresses. Tall stepped tripartite windows with a corbel course above light the interior. An oculus with carved moulding and hoodmould appears in the finialled south gablehead of the nave. The lower chancel has angle buttresses and a stepped tripartite window in its south gable, with an oculus in the finialled gablehead.

The vestry is a small single-bay structure with corner buttresses, abutting the chancel to the west, with a gabled entrance porch featuring a single window on the return and another to the south. The church hall is transversely aligned to the east of the chancel, with an organ chamber extending above it. A gable with apex stack rises to the south, and the east elevation has alternating single and bipartite windows with an oculus in the gable. Small lead-pane glazing appears throughout. The slate roof features small triangular ventilators to the nave and vestry, with moulded eaves gutters.

Interior alterations in 1994 transformed the church to house the Eric Liddell Centre, creating offices and community spaces in a modern industrial style. A four-storey independent office block of largely glazed construction was inserted within the central nave space, sitting free from the historic walls with cantilevered external walkways providing close views of the stained glass windows. As part of this conversion, the north gallery and pulpit were removed and the chancel arch blocked. The side arcades remain open on one side with timber partitions between columns on the other. The original smooth ashlar vaulted entrance and turned stair to the former gallery level remain intact and lead to an open viewing gallery for the north gable windows. A separate small hall at the south end contains flatted accommodation above. The Memorial Hall on the second floor and the larger hall retain the timber barrelled ceilings of the former church.

The church contains a significant collection of twentieth-century stained glass windows. The tripartite north window was created by William Wilson RSA in 1957. A Great Memorial Window triptych of 1920 by the London firm Clayton and Bell commemorates the First World War. Clerestory windows by Marjorie Kemp and Margaret Chiltern date to circa 1925 and 1930, and further windows by John Duncan from 1935 are present, alongside unattributed windows probably by Herbert Hendrie. These windows replaced the original squared and coloured leaded glass windows of 1879 by Dickson and Walker, of which a few survive unaltered. The stained glass underwent renovation circa 2006.