St George's West Church, St George's Lane, Hawick

St George’s West Church, built in 1913-16 by James Pearson Alison with George Hobkirk, is an austere, early 13th-century Gothic style church. It incorporates fabric from a preceding church dating to 1843, and is joined by contemporary halls to the north. The church is constructed of squared and snecked bull-faced Doddington sandstone with ashlar dressings, featuring a base course to the western elevation and overhanging eaves. Lancet windows are set in predominantly chamfered openings; these are tripartite on the west front and east front, and in the side aisles, with bipartite detailing to the clerestory. Angle buttresses are a prominent feature.

The gabled west elevation has three stone steps leading to a two-leaf timber-boarded door within a deep chamfered surround with roll mouldings and a foliate-stopped hoodmould. Above the door is a three-light, pointed-arched, hoodmoulded window. A parapeted, single-storey lobby is located to the right, while a perpendicular gabled stair lobby occupies the left side, featuring a stepped band course and an oblique doorway at the re-entrant angle to the hall.

The windows predominantly feature fixed, diamond-paned, leaded lights, with some stained glass. Sawtooth-coped buttresses and gablet-ended ashlar-coped skews are present. The roof is covered in grey slate with a metal ridge, and cast-iron rainwater goods are fitted.

Inside, the church has a simple trussed and boarded stained pine ceiling supported on plain escutcheon stone corbels. A wide nave is flanked by side aisles, with a clerestory and chancel. There is a gallery and lobbies at the west end (accessed via a stair in the north lobby). The chancel floor is raised and made of Iona marble. The church furnishings include a Borneo cedar communion table and chairs, a lectern, an organ case, a pulpit (on a stone base), pews, gallery, and other furniture. A stone font is situated on a raised platform within a pointed-arched recess at the east end of the north aisle.

The halls are connected by a timber-panelled corridor extending along the north side of the church, with doorways leading to subsidiary rooms. A lower hall is accessible through two-leaf glazed timber doors at the east end, with a Gothic timber-panelled door giving access to the north aisle of the church. Folding timber partitions in the lower hall open onto the full-height main hall, which has a timber-boarded ceiling supported on widely spaced fine cast-iron frames. A stone winder stair rises from the lower hall to a vestry at mezzanine level and to the upper hall on the first floor. The upper hall has a folding timber partition leading to a ‘minstrels’ gallery’ overlooking the main hall. Dado panelling is featured in the corridor and halls, and plain stone chimneypieces are present in the vestry and subsidiary rooms.