St Oswald's Church And Church Halls, Montpelier Park, Edinburgh

St Oswald's Church and Church Halls, Montpelier Park, Edinburgh

St Oswald's is a rectangular-plan gothic church designed by Henry F Kerr and built between 1899 and 1900, with an adjoining hall by Kerr completed in 1894. The building is constructed in cream sandstone, coursed and snecked rubble with ashlar dressings; the hall features red ashlar dressings. The church has a 5-bay nave with side aisles, narthex, porch and side chapel, all detailed with moulded ashlar mullions.

The narthex forms a 2-stage, 3-bay rectangular projection masking the liturgical west end to the southeast. It is articulated with angle buttresses topped by octagonal pinnacled turrets. The ground floor is blank except for three narrow arrowslit windows, while the gallery level has blind arcading of lancets with moulded arches and colonnettes. Every third lancet is divided by buttresses with central inset windows. A cill course and parapet with gablet-capped pinnacles crown the composition.

The entrance porch is a tall gabled structure to the left of the narthex, opening to the southwest. It is flanked by buttresses and features a pointed-arch doorway with clustered colonnettes to chamfered reveals and a moulded arch. Inside, an open timber roof with corbels spans the space, with a relieving arch over the inner doorway. The wide framed-and-lined timber double door is accompanied by decorative cast-iron gates.

A low polygonal stair block to the northeast of the narthex contains lancet stair windows and a parapet. Its slightly advanced round-arched doorway to Montpelier is detailed with a bracketed ashlar dentilled roof, moulded arch and carved inscription in the tympanum.

The nave features a gabled projecting liturgical east end to the northwest with two tall lancet windows to the chancel and an oculus in the gable head. Gablet skews and a stone cross finial above complete this composition. Narrow side aisles flank the nave with lancet windows and lean-to roofs. The clerestorey consists of tripartite lancet windows, four to the northeast and five to the southwest. A rose window with distinctive tracery sits in the southeast gable wall, topped by a stone cross finial.

A low gabled transept to the northeast has paired lancets in its end gable. The rectangular-plan gabled side chapel to the southwest corner is buttressed at its angles and detailed with a cornice and parapet with pinnacles. An oculus with curvilinear tracery and hoodmould sits in the northwest gable with a stone cross finial above. Two 4-light pointed-arch windows with tracery and hoodmoulds, divided by a buttress, light the southwest elevation. A pointed-arch doorway in the porch, set obliquely in the re-entrant angle formed with the side aisle, carries a roll-moulded arch with hoodmould.

The gabled rectangular-plan hall stands alongside the northwest of the church and is linked by a porch. The southwest gable displays a stepped tripartite window under a pointed-arch hoodmould with a central 2-light window and plain stone cross finial. The northeast gable has a stepped tripartite window with cusped heads. The link to the main church features a round-arched doorway to Montpelier Park with nook-shaft and hoodmould, flanked by one rectangular and one small bipartite window. A small parapet surmounts the link. The church roof is steeply pitched with green slates and black slates to the hall, lead flashings, five small gablet roof vents to each pitch, and a single stack to the northeast of the nave.

Internally, the outer walls are rendered rubble with ashlar dressings. Narrow aisles run alongside the pointed-arch arcade, which features octagonal stone piers. The clerestorey is plain, while the elaborate crown-post timber roof has a decoratively carved wallplate. Timber dado treatment appears to the aisles and west wall, with arcade wall stugged rubble. Single slender colonnettes with annulets rise from foliate corbels at the arcade. The western wall contains an arcade of three pointed-arch openings to the gallery, with square-headed roll-moulded doors to the vestibule in its centre and in the aisle ends.

A moulded chancel arch with a single shaft rising from a plain corbel divides the nave from the chancel. The plain chancel features an elaborately carved stone reredos in Decorated style. Two organ chambers in arches on each side, created by Morgan & Smith in 1900, have Decorated Gothic carved timber bases. Stained glass by C E Kempe in the east wall, dated 1899, depicts Christ in Majesty with scenes from the crucifixion and resurrection. The rose window of the southwest chapel is also by Kempe and shows the Trinity.

A low rubble boundary wall with saddleback coping and short gatepiers enclose the setting.