St Margaret's Roman Catholic Church, St Olaf Street, Lerwick

St Margaret's Roman Catholic Church, St Olaf Street, Lerwick

This Roman Catholic church was designed by James Malcolm Baikie of Kirkwall and completed in 1911. It is a five-bay gothic building of rectangular plan with a distinctive apsed chancel projecting from the west elevation. The two outer bays of the north and south elevations feature gabled entrance porches.

The church is constructed from bull-faced squared and snecked Bressay freestone with polished Eday sandstone ashlar dressings and details. Base and eaves courses run around the building, with angle buttresses at the corners.

The north elevation facing Harbour Street is a five-bay asymmetrical composition divided by buttresses. The outer left bay contains a gabled porch with a pointed-arched hoodmoulded door set in the gable and an arcaded two-light window with pointed arch-heads to its east side. The remaining bays to the right feature two-light trefoil-headed plate-traceried windows with hoodmoulded pointed-arched surrounds.

The east elevation on St Olaf Street is stepped and features an arcaded, hoodmoulded three-light window centring a gable with a blind trefoil in the gablehead above. The south elevation mirrors the north elevation but includes a two-light window also in the east side of its porch.

The west elevation displays the apsidal chancel projecting with lancets in its side elevations. The semicircular end is buttressed at the poles and has a deep moulded eaves course, with a blind trefoil centred in the gablehead above.

The roofs are covered in purple-grey slate with fishscale pattern detailing to the apse. Profiled cast-iron gutters and octagonal downpipes with hoppers and decorative brackets drain the building. Triangular ashlar skew copes with stone crosses mark the apexes of the principal and porch gables.

The interior contains a two-leaf inner entrance door with vertically-boarded panelling. A marble memorial slab to Margaret Cruickshanks, the benefactress of the church who died in 1910, is set on the east window cill. The nave has a timber floor with pews and vertically-boarded wainscoting. Windows feature diamond pattern glazing with coloured glass, while the east window contains stained glass by C R Sinclair dating to 1986 depicting modern and historic Shetland industry. An open timber roof spans the nave on four pointed-arched trusses bearing on plain ashlar corbels. A large pointed-arched hoodmoulded opening leads to the sanctuary, which is separated by an ornate timber screen fronted by an altar carved with a relief of the Last Supper. A niche containing a cross is centred in the screen with a carved cross above, flanked by smaller niches containing religious figures.

The presbytery at 87 St Olaf Street dates to circa 1910. It is a two-storey symmetrical house of three bays in rectangular plan. The principal front is built from bull-faced squared and snecked sandstone with droved ashlar dressings, while the side and rear elevations are rubble with droved ashlar dressings. A four-panel timber entrance door with plate glass fanlight above occupies the centre bay at ground level. Single-storey three-light canted bays feature in the flanking bays, each with cill course, cornice and blocking course. The first floor has regular bipartite windows in the outer bays. The south gable is blank, while the north gable has two closely spaced windows at first-floor level to the right of centre. Modern lean-to additions occupy the ground-floor rear elevation, and a tall stair window is centred at first-floor level with irregular fenestration in the flanking bays.

Timber sash and case windows predominate, mostly with plate glass. The canted bays have four-pane glazing, whilst the stair window features 21-pane border-glazed fixed lights. A purple-grey slate roof with cast-iron gutters and downpipes with hopper at the right covers the building. Bull-faced sandstone apex stacks with octagonal cans are coped at the roof line.

The boundary walls, gates and gatepiers are of bull-faced sandstone. A dwarf wall with droved ashlar cope surmounted by Art Nouveau influenced cast-iron railing bounds the church along Harbour and St Olaf Streets. Bull-faced sandstone square gatepiers with droved ashlar pyramidal caps and two-leaf cast-iron gates matching the railing provide entry to the church. The western boundary is formed by a random rubble wall, while the presbytery entry features a cast-iron gate matching the railing.