Church Heritage Record 603241

West tower and spire, nave of five bays with galleries; apsidal chancel: small south-west porch.

The church of St. John was the first of two eighteenth-century churches to be built to serve the expanding town and it dates from 1754. (The other, St. Anne's, of 1792 , is now redundant and forms the foyer of a theatre). It was erected on land granted by the Corporation in 1749 and it was consecrated in 1755 as a chapel of ease to the parish church. The first minister was nominated on 15th June that year by the Bishop of Chester (in which Diocese Lancaster then stood) but it was not given its own parish until 1842. The tower and spire were added to the church in 1784 to the designs of Thomas Harrison. Harrison was born in 1744 the son of a joiner, at Richmond, Yorkshire, and by the liberality of Lawrence Dunds of Aske he was sent to study in Italy where he made some designs for Pope Clement XIV although, probably owing to the death of the Pope, these were never executed. He returned to England in 1776, at first to Richmond but by the 1780's he was in Lancaster, where his first important commission was for a bridge across the River Lune in 1783.

The body of the church is of five bays with a plain plinth and moulded cornice along the parapet. The side walls have round-headed windows in each bay, those in the end bays of side cut short to allow doorways belaw (save at the north east, although this may have been altered). The windows have plain pilasters and moulded arches with plain blocks for imposts and similarly plain keystones. The original arrangement of glazing appears to survive. There are two more such windows in the west wall and at the east end is an apse for the sanctuary with two windows of similar design set in the curved wall. The angles of the building have quoins and the parapet is marked by a shallow projection at each bay.

The tower is constructed separately from the body of the church and does not appear even to be bonded with it. It is a robust and distinctive design of three substantial square stages capped by an elegant rotunda and spire. The lowest stage is rusticated and has a doorway in the west well with a straight hond and a convex frieze between the rchitrave and the cornice. Set in the wall above is a tablet recording that the tower was built from a legacy provided by Thomas Bowes of Lancaster for the purpose in 1784. The side walls have rectangular windows with moulded surrounds in the lower part and lunettes above.

The middle stage is separated from the last by a projecting moulded cornice. The stonework is unbroken except for a simple roundel for the clockface in the west wall (although clock faces also appear on the north and south walls where no such provision was made). The uppermost stage is set back slightly above another moulded comice (with the addition of dentils) and has louvred aedicules in each face. These have pilasters at each side and pediments which break through the moulded cornice marking the top of the square part of the tower.

The spire is in the form of a circular temple with eight unfluted half Doric columns set round the edge and rectangular openings with smaller blind rectangles above them between the pillars. The entablature has a full Doric arrangement of triglyphs (with plain metopes) and mutules. Rising above this is a concave substructure decorated with small swags of foliage (rather like those on the Town Hall cupola) leading up into the small fluted spirelet which crowns the whole composition.

The arrangement of the interior of the church is the standard for town churches of this period, with galleries along each side and across the west end supported on square panelled plinths and supporting unfluted Ionic pillars which carry the weight of the roof. The plastered ceiling is flat over the galleries but with coving and a dentilled cornice above the nave and chancel, the ceiling continuing into the apse without a break. The floor is paved with stone flags in the alleys but is of timber boards in the pews; an area of timber east of the present front pews shows that some further cast have been removed. The galleries are all original, in oak with fielded panels along the fronts, approached by elegant staircases in front of the windows of the west wall of the church. Although the panelled dado remains in the lower part of the church, together with all the box pews except those in the easternmost bay of the nave, the box pews have all been removed from the galleries. In the west gallery the original organ case remains.