Church Heritage Record 608100

The church consists of nave and chancel under one roof with a co-terminous north aisle and chapel also under one roof and a south aisle which stops short of the onst and to allow space for vestries. The body of the church and the north aisle are ten bays in length. The western bay has porches to the north and south; there is no west doorway but access may also be gained through the south-east vestry and through a small porch in the fourth bay from the east in the north wall. The east gable of the south aisle is carried up to form a bell-cote, structure which must have been an alteration or addition in 1910 to Micklethwaite's design.

By J.T. Micklethwaite (1843-1906), built 1901-2. The south aisle (part, it seems, of the original design), was added in 1910. The church was gutted by bombing in 1941 and for a time, worship was conducted in "St. Bartholomew-in-the-Ruins", a temporary wooden hut created in the nave. In 1947, this was destroyed by fire and services were hold in the vestry for a year until St. John's Institute was taken into use s a temporary church. The south aisle was restored in 1949 and the remainder 1953.

The church is large in every dimension, and the repetitive design of the bays facing the street makes it rather forbidding. Each is divided from the next by tall buttresses, severely plain with only one off-set close to the top before the sloping upper face leads them back to the wall-surface. All the bays save the westernmost have three-light windows under two-centred heads, all of the same height and each with a narrow stone hood; those in the three eastern bays are shorter than the rest, to show the extent of the chapel within as opposed to the aisle, and the next window is shorter still to allow for a small doorway under a pent roof below.

The west wall has three tall gables all in the same plan, the central one with a five-light window with flowing tracery, through which the midle light runs uninterrupted to the apex of the arch. The aisles each have three-light windows of the same pattern as those in the north and south walls. Each window is constructed of stone, and each has a simple moulded hood and inverted brick strainer arch below. Again, the bays are divided by starkly simple buttresses. The south wall is similar to the north but without the small porch in the fourth bay from the east.

At the east end, to allow for reredoses within, the windows are set even higher in the walls than at the west. That to the chancel is also rather broader, with seven lights grouped in the rhythm 2-3-2 with reticulated and flowing tracery above, the prominent pair of mullions running straight up to the arch. The north chapel has a three-light east window with reticulated tracery.

It seems to have been the architect's purpose, to provide a capacious plain building with severly undecorated wall-surfaces an ceilings within which the richly decorated and polychrome furnishings would draw the eye to focal liturgical points of the building. As far as the architecture goes, this effect is to some extent achieved, and the impression is of a rather Netherlandish hall church without a clerestory but with aisles almost as tall as the nave standing under their own gables.

The arcades are carried on octagonal piers without bases or capitals into which the mouldings of the arches die. The arches, outlined by a continuous moulded hood, are tall and wide, and increase the impression of a hall church. The nave and chancel are ceiled with a panelled vault which extends uninterrupted from east to west with small turned pendants at the intersections of the ribs. The aisles are similarly roofed. The pale blue ceilings and the white walls exaggerate the size of the building. The floors are of wood blocks save in the western bay and in the chancel and sanctuary, where they are paved with concrete tiles.

The east end of the north aisle, running parallel with the chancel, is arranged as a chapel, separated from the chancel by minimal Gothic screens. The chancel itself is furnished with choirstalls in the western bay and the whole of the east bay forms the spacious sanctuary within which a second altar has been placed in front of the high altar.