Greenock Elim Church, Kelly Street, Greenock

Greenbank Elim Church, located on Kelly Street, Greenock, was built in 1882 as a United Presbyterian Church, designed by the architect Hippolyte Jean Blanc. The church is in the Early Pointed Gothic revival style and stands on a corner site. It is cruciform in plan, featuring two transepts, and has a prominent, four-stage saddleback tower—a tower with a pitched roof—located at the southeast corner. The building is constructed with squared, rock-faced rubble, with ashlar margins, set-back buttresses, a deep base course, and hoodmoulds above the windows. The window openings, for both the church and tower, are mostly shallow pointed. The gables of the nave and transepts are lit by three lancet windows.

The principal elevation, facing southeast onto Kelly Street, has a central gabled section with four small lancet windows in the lower part, three larger lancets above, a roundel above the lancets, and a Celtic cross at the apex. To the right of this section, stairs lead to a two-leaf, timber-panelled entrance door set within a deep, pointed-arch doorway at the ground stage of the tower. The tower has narrow lancet windows on the upper storeys and bipartite windows—windows divided into two parts by a central column—on two faces of the top storey. To the southwest of this elevation is a lower, single-storey, round-ended room with a timber entrance door and small, narrow lancet windows. Further to the southwest, and set back from the road, is a canted, two-storey section with a hexagonal roof.

The windows are primarily of small pane fixed glass, and the roof is covered with grey slates and some red ridge tiling.

The interior, viewed in 2016, has been modified to create a worship space with no pews, communion table, or pulpit. The original rubble walling is exposed. A distinctive timber trefoil barrel vaulted roof is present. Several sections have been enclosed to create more room space, including the former gallery, parts of the transepts, and an area beneath the gallery. The main nave has two narrow, five-bay aisles, with bays visually separated by pointed arches supported on stone piers with octagonal capitals.

A church hall, added in 1933, sits to the rear of the canted section to the southwest of the church. The hall was designed by the local architect Alexander Stewart McGregor and is constructed with squared rubble and a grey slate roof. The hall’s interior features a dark timber ceiling with rooflights.

A low boundary wall, with saddleback coping, is present to the southeast and northeast.