Catholic Church of Christ the King, including forecourt walls, gate and gate piers is a Grade II listed building in the Powys local planning authority area, Wales. First listed on 22 May 2024. Church.
Catholic Church of Christ the King, including forecourt walls, gate and gate piers
- WRENN ID
- tilted-slate-russet
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- Powys
- Constituency
- Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe MP: David Chadwick (LD)
- Country
- Wales
- Date first listed
- 22 May 2024
- Type
- Church
- Address
- Catholic Church of Christ the King, including forecourt walls, gate and gate piers, Builth Wells, Builth
- OS grid reference
- SO 035 511
- Coordinates
- 52.14989, -3.41143
- Source
- Cadw listing
Description
The Catholic Church of Christ the King is an Arts and Crafts Romanesque style church, built in the 20th century and set back from Garth Road. It is accompanied by a forecourt featuring brick boundary walls, a gate, and gate piers. The church is constructed of pale red brick in a Flemish bond pattern, topped with a pantile roof and deep eaves with tiled kneelers. The windows are narrow and round-headed, with clear glazing in small rectangular panes. Sloping buttresses feature on the sides and porch.
The church consists of a wide, aisle-less nave, a west porch, a sanctuary, and flat-roofed sacristies set below the main roof at the east end. The west front projects with a pitched-roof porch featuring a triple-ordered round arched doorway. Pairs of windows are located on either side of the porch, above a stone crucifix in relief, created after the style of Eric Gill, with the inscription "REGNAVIT A LIGNO DEVS" (God has reigned from a tree). Buttresses mark the front corners of the porch. The sides of the church have four bays, with paired windows in the first bay and triple windows in the remaining bays, with buttresses between each bay. Paired windows are present in the sacristies, and higher-level paired windows flank the sanctuary. The main east wall is blind, with a further flat-roofed extension at the east end, including a boarded door in the south wall and single windows in a stepped east wall.
A narrow entrance porch leads to a timber vestibule with part-glazed doors on each side. The interior is a single, wide space with a wood parquet floor, plain plastered walls, and a curved ceiling. A baptistery is located in the northwest corner, featuring an octagonal stone font enclosed by wrought iron railings incorporating riddel posts from the original high altar. The sanctuary at the east end is raised by a single step. The original high altar is set back, accompanied by a modern forward altar from 2013, featuring an oak canopy with a gilded dove above. A stone piscine is positioned in the wall on the south side. The church contains high-quality furnishings and woodwork, including Stations of the Cross by Dame Werburg Welch OSB, a confessional in the northwest corner, and a statue of Christ the King over the high altar, both created by Charles Victor Gretner, a woodcarver from Hereford, and originally made for an earlier chapel. Two oak statues of St Joseph and the Virgin Mary, carved by Francis Leech, flank the sanctuary. The original chairs are still in place.
Local climate
Catholic Church of Christ the King, including forecourt walls, gate and gate piers sits in a wetter-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 1,080 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 86% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is greater than that of 75% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 46 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 87% of listed buildings. Of these, 25 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
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- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
- No related consent applications matched
- Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
- Flood risk assessment
- Radon risk assessment
- Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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