St John's Church, Bath Street, Gourock

St John’s Church is a Decorated Gothic style church built in 1857 by J, J M & W H Hay, with the tower completed in 1877-8 by Bruce & Spurrock. It is situated alongside a church hall to the southeast and includes an attached enclosure. The church is constructed of variegated rubble with cream ashlar dressings, while the tower uses coursed and squared rubble and the nave and church hall are of rubble construction. It features a prominent four-stage northeast tower topped with an open-work crown.

The tower has large diagonal buttresses and an off-set octagonal stair turret with arrow-slit windows and a half-pyramidal ashlar roof. A broad pointed-arched doorway on the northeast side has a carved label stop, paired colonnettes with ball flowers, and a boarded door with decorative wrought-iron hinges. Bipartite windows are on the northwest return, and a large tripartite window is positioned at the second stage. The third stage has paired lancets with trefoiled heads and nook-shafts rising to the crown. The top stage features drum pinnacled angle buttresses, clocks set in pointed-arch panels with finials, and the open-work crown with extensive crockets and an ashlar bellcote.

The nave is six bays long, with a northwest elevation featuring bipartite windows separated by buttresses; the northernmost bay is gabled with a taller window breaking the eaves. The southeast elevation is largely obscured by the church hall. The gabled southeast end has a large blocked pointed-arched window with a modern cross window inserted, and a single-story piended and platformed vestry with bipartite and tripartite windows is located below.

The church hall, adjoining the main building to the southeast, has gabled elevations with broad mullioned windows. A modern flat-roofed addition is on the southwest side, and the southeast elevation has modern windows and render.

The interior is whitewashed and features a tall, arch-braced timber roof with shafts rising from stone corbels. A raked timber gallery, previously housing an organ but now redundant, has a panelled front supported by cantilever brackets. A projecting carved timber vestibule, dating to approximately 1900, has trefoiled openings and leaded border glazing. Timber dados and pews run throughout. Matching timber panelled fittings include a communion table, a canted pulpit with a carved sounding board, and a lectern, all featuring blind arcading and carved shields. Stained glass windows are present: two on the northwest side, one dating back to circa 1880 and the other a memorial to those lost during World War I.

The boundary walls are low rubble construction with saddleback coping and later railings. Steps lead to the doorway, framed by gatepiers with stop-chamfered arrises and moulded coping, which support ornate iron lamp standards.