Church Heritage Record 616126

5-bay nave with aisles and west baptistery, 2-bay chancel with flanking south Lady Chapel and north organ chamber and vestries. Boiler house under the east end.

Nave approximately 20m (68ft) x 8m (26ft), chancel 8m.

he church was built in 1895-9, designed by George Walter Planck, an architect of some ability. Canon Henry Proctor, vicar of St Luke’s was the driving force behind the building, and gave the site.  A foundation stone at the east end of the church records that it was laid on 24 October 1898. The two bays of the west end were completed and baptistery added in 1929-30 to a design by H A Dancey, there is a panel here on the Linden Rd (north) side which reads “This stone was unveiled on Palm Sunday April 13th 1930, recording the completion of the church.” This phase cost £7,000.  The church was dedicated to St Luke the Less until this point (it had originally been in the parish of St Luke’s, this church was demolished in 1935). In the 1930s the church was refurnished and furnishings and fittings designed by Stephen Dykes-Bower were added in the early 1940s; the cartoon by the former for a stained glass east window is preserved in the church.  In the mid-1980s reordering of the interior was undertaken, most notably the screening off of the aisles to form a parish room and church room.  This was financed by the sale of the church hall, previously on the other side of the “paddock”.

This is quite a large and ambitious town church. It is designed in the Free Perpendicular Gothic favoured at this time, indeed it has the look of an Edwardian church. The church is large and quite tall with a clearstorey but externally has little vertical emphasis, a small lead fleche at the junction of nave and chancel scarcely visible from most angles. Nevertheless the building has some physical presence due to its mass and location on the ring road.  

Some aspects of the church are quite idiosyncratic, with wilful use of extraneous detail to give the building more visual interest on the show sides. Whether this is all perceived as impressive or rather forced probably depends on the individual’s philosophy and mood, but the building undeniably has more interest than many suburban churches of the period.

Examples of this are the very unusual tracery in the east window, of seven lights whereby the outer pairs form blind 2-lights, and the shape of a crown formed by the tracery of the head to the wide central light. Squared brick parapets in front of the chancel gable. The adjacent Lady Chapel has a 4-light window under an ogee gable echoing this, which has lost its finial. Equally ambitious are the buttressed mullions of the north “transept” window (the projection is minimal at ground level, but tall gable), echoing the east window of the cathedral.

The later west end is simpler, on two levels, a lower tier formed by the battlemented and canted baptistery which wraps around the west end of the nave and aisles with 2-light windows and pointed doorways to the aisles, above which is a large 4-light window with ogee-headed moulded frame. The 4-centred arch is employed everywhere, with 4-light windows to the aisles and transepts and 3-light windows to the clearstorey. There are plain square 3- and 4-light windows at low level to the transept and vestries. Sheer brick buttresses, terminating in stepped stone weatherings.

The interior is plastered and limewashed, high and bright with plain glazing throughout, the effect slightly lessened by the addition of solid breeze-block screens to springing level and glazed above, enclosing the aisles and partly blocking the light from the side windows.   Polygonal piers with plain bases, no capitals and continuous mouldings to the arches, pilasters rise from the piers to carry a false hammerbeam roof with idiosyncratic handling of the details.  The windows have stepped sills. The break between the 1890s’ and 1930s’ work is invisible, the baptistery opening off the nave at the west end, simply furnished with plain benches around the font. The baptistery and nave have woodblock floors, the nave filled with ranks of open-backed chairs of the 1930s.

Looking east, there is no chancel arch, but a low stone chancel screen and a very good painted wooden rood beam of c 1920 by A S Dixon with figures by W S Frith mark the division. It was brought here from the redundant church of Gloucester All Saints c1990. A nave altar platform with modern curving communion rails has been introduced in front of this.

The organ takes up the north side of the chancel, the console is in the Lady Chapel, which is sparsely furnished, blue carpet. The furnishings and fittings of the chancel date to the 1930s, with good choir stalls and communion rails with panelled backs. Simple sedilia and piscina set into the south wall. There is an English Altar by Dykes-Bower. Red carpets here over a quarry tile floor, with encaustic tiles in the sanctuary, the altar raised on a stone and tile base. Plain altar table with red carpet over encaustic tiles at the east end of the north aisle, beneath the War Memorial.