Westgate Presbyterian Church and railings

Westgate Presbyterian Church and railings

A Calvinistic Methodist chapel built in 1828 and enlarged in 1866, constructed in coursed rock-faced Pembrokeshire grey limestone with red brick dressings and a slate roof. The building sits on a slope with a basement schoolroom exposed to the right side.

The front elevation features an Italian Romanesque style with a projecting gable front with coped shouldered gable and gabled kneelers. The principal feature is a large centre triplet of three arched lights with bi-colour surrounds and two column piers in red brick and grey-brown sandstone. The centre light has a stilted head. Below the windows is sloping brick with black brick patterns down to stone sills, and beneath this a carved double scroll with "Westgate" inscribed on the upper scroll and "Calvinistic Methodist Chapel 1828 1866" on the longer lower scroll.

Ground floor level features two narrow single lights with bi-colour heads, sandstone sides and sills. The doubly recessed doorway has an outer arch in bi-colour brick and limestone, arched underneath with a pointed upper side, set on chamfered limestone jambs. The inner arch has chamfered jambs and a red brick arch with stone keystone. Double doors with diagonal boarding sit under a sandstone flat lintel supported on two shaped sandstone corbels, with brick infill above featuring a black brick pattern. A matching doorway exists in the rebated left side wall of the front projection.

A projecting stair tower to the right has a canted hipped roof. It contains a window similar to the ground floor lights at mid level and another similar window set higher in its side wall.

The side and rear elevations are two storeys with a four-window range. The lower storey has tall arched windows with sandstone frames and bi-colour arches, while the basement has cambered headed windows in similar frames with a grey limestone framed door between the third and fourth windows. The upper side has similar arched windows but with a small gabled single-storey projection between the third and fourth windows, built across the basement area. An arched door in a limestone frame opens to the front. All windows are metal, probably mid twentieth-century replacements. The plain rendered rear wall faces upslope.

The surrounding iron railings feature fleur-de-lys finials on grey stone coping, interrupted by paired grey stone gatepiers with painted square slightly brattished caps, possibly of terracotta.

Interior

The chapel interior has plastered walls and a segmental pointed ceiling in plaster panels divided by thin moulded ribs. Behind the pulpit stands a large ornate three-bay plaster pilastrade with flat cornice. A single end gallery sits on two iron columns with a deep boarded overhang and front in panels with diagonal boarding and stop-chamfered surrounds. A lobby beneath contains two doors and an octofoil centre window.

Pews are arranged in three blocks, inward-facing on each side of the pulpit. They have roll-moulded backs with vertical boarding and similar ends with low doors. The pulpit has been moved forward to accommodate a large organ partly obscuring the rear pilastrade, flanked by raked choir seats. The organ is tall with a Gothic case featuring a blind colonnade below with painted pipes.

Matching marble memorials to the Reverend John Rees Owen (died 1888) and the Reverend William Powell (died 1894) flank the pulpit. A simple platform with side steps and rail mounted on Gothic iron standards with leaf-scroll brackets sits before the ornate pulpit, which has a three-panel front with fretwork Gothic panels over diagonally-boarded panels, similar sides, and a heavy moulded cornice. Early twentieth-century coloured glass fills the windows flanking the pulpit. The basement schoolroom contains six iron columns.