Church of St Margaret

The Church of St Margaret is a complex High Victorian parish church built in the Early English style, with some later 13th century detailing. It has a plan that includes a chancel, an east organ chamber, a transept, west vestries with a tower at the angle, an aisled nave, and a northwest porch. The exterior features snecked rubble masonry with pale freestone dressings, parapet gables with seatings for finials, and slate roofs.

The tall buttressed south front has a niche containing a statue of St Margaret at the gable, along with a wide five-light window featuring cusped lancets arranged in echelon, a hoodmould, spandrel paterae, and a stepped sill band. The square southwest tower has a short pyramidal spire and weathervane behind a crenellated parapet, Y-tracery bell-openings, and a polygonal stair turret. The lateral gables are adorned with plate tracery windows, and the east side window has decorated tracery in its finial surround. The aisles have twin lancets, and the northwest porch showcases an elaborately carved tympanum depicting Christ in a mandorla with angel supporters, a crocketted arch above, a roundel in the apex, and cusped panelling on the double doors. The simple north front features a large cusped oculus above the door.

Inside, the chancel boasts a boarded and ribbed waggon roof, along with foliage paterae and angel supporters. There are hood moulds, nook shafts, stiff-leaf capitals on the windows, and head stops with some portraits on the lateral arches. The arcaded end wall features a five-bay tabernacled reredos from 1904 designed by Bruce Vaughan, which contains seated figures and a triple arch sedilia. The tall chancel arch has tripartite responds with fillets. The six-bay nave lacks a clerestory, with a wide bay second from the east, round piers with foliage and scallop capitals, and double-chamfered arches; the western bays have an unmoulded treatment, a plain waggon roof, and lean-to aisles.

Notable furnishings include a pulpit and lectern from 1897-1898, a stone font from 1905, and an organ from 1914 that was remodelled in 1952 to designs by Sir Percy Thomas. The church also features fine stained glass, including chancel windows from 1900 by Robert J Newbery of London, commemorating John Nixon, a principal colliery owner in the Cynon Valley; other windows were created by Mary Lowndes in 1917 (north transept), James Clarke in 1916 (northern aisle northeast), and AJ Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild in 1930 (northern aisle).