Church Heritage Record 640006

Nave of five bays with aisles and clerestory, north-west tower and spire and south-west porch; transepts project from the eastern bay of the nave; chancel with founder's chapel on the south and organ chamber and vestries on the north.

The church was commissioned by Edward Akroyd in 1856, in which year the designs by George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) were exhibited at the Royal Academy. The foundation stone was laid on 25th April and the church was consecrated on 2nd November 1859. On 11th June in the following year, Colonel Akroyd was elected a member of the Ecclesiological Society and thereafter appointed to the Committee. The whole cost of the building is variously estimated at £40,000 or £70,000. Whatever it was, Akroyd provided the endowment and there is no doubt that his funds were virtually unlimited; the church may therefore be considered as Scott's ideal of what parish church should be. The choice of Scott to design the church is interesting and shows perhaps that Akroyd wanted the best model that could be procured of the traditional English church.

Built throughout in Scott's favourite style which incorporates features of the late Early English and Early Decorated periods, this is not an indigenous Yorkshire building. The west front is the show front and approached from the pavement up a wide flight of steps. The west wall of the nave is divided into two orders by a moulded stringcourse below which is a great doorway under an arch of several moulded orders carried on five levels of alternately granite and stone nook shafts. At each side of the door are blind arches forming an arcade across the nave, and all the wall surface above them is covered with a richly carved diaper pattern. The west window has five lights, the central one slightly taller and the outer four grouped into two pairs. Above the outer lights are cinquefoils and the tracery consists of three cinquefoils within a circle. At each side are tall buttresses rising to the eaves where they terminate in gablets which also form the heads of niches for statues. These buttresses are repeated all round the building on the chancel, transepts and tower, having in all nineteen statues which, with the addition of eight higher on the tower, make a total of twenty-seven almost life sized figures.

The west wall of the south aisle has a three-light window with two quatrefoils and a trefoil as tracery, all the windows throughout the church having the sophisticated details of shafts against all the mullions and richly moulded tracery.

The tower is divided externally into four principal stages by moulded stringcourses, of which the uppermost is the tallest and the lowest follows next, the two between being rather understated. A moulded plinth continues round the base of the tower and indeed round the whole of the church. In addition to angle buttresses at the corners with enrichments of gablets and statues within niches similar to those on the nave, transepts and chancel, the lowest stage has further small buttresses between the windows in order to take the thrust from the stone vault of the baptistery inside. Each side of these secondary buttresses there is only space for a small lancet light with a trefoiled head. The buttresses end, however, at the first stringcourse and the next stage has two-light windows in the west, north and east walls with the carved shafts and hoodmoulds found elsewhere in the church. The third stage, which houses the clock, has two small lancets in each face with a clock face above them on the north and west sides. These windows are very much plainer, with only roll-mouldings round the edges. At the top of this stage the buttresses terminate in gablets but from these spring small colonettes with foliated capitals which form the bases for a further series of eight large statues of Saints.

These flank the bell-openings which are probably the most memorable feature of the exterior of the church. They are very tall and powerfully modelled, with steeply stepped sills externally and clustered shafts at each side, the openings being of two pairs of lights in each wall of the tower. Above each pair of lights is a heavily moulded quatrefoil and the stage terminates in a boldly decorated corbel table which supported the crested parapet of the tower. The buttresses, having at this stage become octagonal turrets, continue above the parapet in large, much crocketted pinnacles, the crockets being echoed lower down by the use of bands of dog-tooth up the edges of the octagonal sections.

Within the parapet rises the spire, a suitably noble conception to crown the magnificent tower, with three orders of lucarnes and several bands of scale pattern carved on the stone work. The slender shape is articulated by roll mouldings up the edges and the whole terminates in a weathercock 236 feet above the level of the ground. This apparently makes the spire second in height only to Wakefield Cathedral in the whole of Yorkshire.

Apart from the fact that the tower is replaced on the south by a south porch, the flanking walls of the nave are symmetrical. Each of the three remaining bays of the aisles is provided with a three light window, the mullions again shafted and with foliate capitals, and each bay separated from the next by a buttress which rises just above the plainly moulded parapet in a small gablet decorated with a floret. Each gablet has a carved finial. The clerestory over these three bays has paired lights, again shafted, with trefoiled heads to the lights and roundels above each. The western bay on the south side, above the south porch, is slightly wider and has three such lights in the clerestory. That on the north is attached to the tower. The south porch itself has a steep gable with two orders of shafts carrying the moulded outer arch and a stone floor with the flags laid diamond-wise. The side walls have threo arches each side, the outer arches pierced with windows and the middle pair blind because of intermediate buttresses outside.

The transepts project from the wider eastern bay of the nave, with a slightly awkward blind area of stonework where the slope of the roof cuts across the clerestory, precluding the continuation of the decorative cornice. Both transepts have a four-light window with two cinquefoils and three trefoils in a circle for tracery small difference in design is that the north transept has a little doorway in the west wall, a feature omitted from the equivalent place on the south. Again at the angles are buttresses terminating in gablets and with statues in niches.

The chancel is of two bays, with chapels of two lesser bays flanking the western bay. Both chapels have two two-light windows in the side walls and while that on the south has a much taller two light window in the east wall, that on the north has an eight-petalled rose window because of the vestry below. The south chapel is the founder's chapel and the north chapel seems always to have been intended for the organ chamber. The latter has a small passage along the north side through which access may be gained from outside the church to either the transept to the west or the choir vestry to the east. The latter, a square room, has paired lights in the north and east walls and a chimney at the south-east angle. The vicar's vestry which lies between this and the chancel has, a pent roof against the east wall of the organ chamber. The east wall of the chancel has gabled buttresses similar to those of the transepts but with the additional embellishment of small crocketted finials each side of the gablet. The eastern parts of the building are further enriched by recessed shafts up the angles of the walls and by beautifully carved foliage in repeating patterns along the eaves, interrupted at some points by gargoyles carved as naturalistic animal heads rather than the mediaeval grotesques.

The interior of the church is straightforward in plan, avoiding any of the novelties which more emancipated architects might have introduced but as with the exterior, the design is substantial. The nave arcades are of three equal bays with a slight wider bay at the west and a yet wider bay leading into the transepts at the east end. The piers are quatrefoil in plan with lavishly carved foliate capitals and moulded bases. In the spandrels are roundels with carved busts of the Fathers of the church. 

The west door has two orders of nook shafts, one pair of stone and one of polished granite, and above the door is a tympanum filled with tracery and in the panels here are the Pelican in her Piety with the sacred monograms below. The stops to the inner hood of the south-west door probably represent the founder and his wife. The west bay of the north arcade is differentiated by the substructure of the tower, with a solid square pier with attached shafts replacing the first free-standing pier. Within the base of the tower is the baptistery, the large font taking up much of the floor space and the walls enriched with attached marble shafts rising to a stellate vault with a central circular bell-way and boses at the intersections of the ribs. The windows are narrow lancets in a slightly earlier style than the rest of the church and have steeply sloping sills which exaggerate the sense of enclosure by emphasising the thickness of the walls. The capitals also, though still carved with foliage, are slightly more restrained than elsewhere and this also gives an impression of an earlier style.

The clerestory has a continuous arcade with shafts of Derbyshire marble against each stone upright and more prominent shafts of Peterhead granite beneath the principals, all highly polished. The roof structure has scissor-braces to each rafter giving the effect of a cradle roof and the bays are defined by arch-braces strengthening each principal. Across the aisles at each bay are stone retaining arches which help to buttress the clerestory, and the outer faces of the arcades were also originally treated with painted decoration. All the window of the church have shafts and moulded tracery internally as well as externally, giving an effect of great richness. 

On the east side of the transepts arches open into the north and south chapels, which also communicate with the chancel. 

The chancel arch is taller than the arches to the transepts, and very noble with attached ringed shafts of polished marble adorning the principal shafts against the responds and square florets on the soffit of the arch. The foliated capitals, being at the same height as those of the transepts, form a continuous band of carved foliage flowers of great vigour. The chancel floor is three steps above the level of the nave and the distinction is further marked by one of Skidmore's inventive screens raised on a plinth of scale-patterned alabaster. In the western bay are the choir stalls, very substantial and of oak with carved details to the uprights. Behind these, large arches open into the flanking chapels, both subdivided by a central trumeau with a carving in high reliéf in a roundel set in the spandrel.

The two bays of the chancel are divided by attached shafts of polished marble, again with elaborately carved capitals at the level of the wall-plate (which is itself richly carved), and the eastern bay is entirely taken up by the spacious sanctuary. The lower parts of the walls are decorated with a continuous arcade on Italian marble shafts and with spandrels filled with profuse naturalistic carving. Under three arches on the south side are contrived sedilia. Further east in the end bay of the south wall is a black marble shelf with a cable-moulded edge attached to wall as a credence table. The vestry is entered by a small doorway within the western arch on the north side. The communion rails have been altered at a later date and there is now no frontal on the altar, but otherwise the chancel arrangements seem to be complete.