Churches were chopped down in their prime
THIS week in 1971 the silhouette of Cheltenham town centre changed when the belfry storey of St Matthew’s church in Clarence Street was removed following concerns over its safety.
The original St Matthew’s was a vast structure in corrugated iron that served as a place of worship for 16 years.
Then on April 17, 1879 the present stone building was consecrated and completed five years later at a total cost of £20,000. Look at old photographs of the church and you’ll see it was once graced by a handsome broach spire.
By 1950 this was considered unstable and the decision to remove it was taken. The Echo reported that the spire was demolished by Harold Green, Thomas Handley and Raymond Ash who between them brought down 21 tons of lead, plus many more of timber and masonry.
Other churches in the county have had bits lopped and pruned over the years.
Some have disappeared altogether. If you travel along Albion Street in Cheltenham and followed its curve into Berkeley Street, you may have wondered why, on the right, there’s a vacant patch of green in an otherwise built-up area.
The reason is that St John’s church stood there until it was demolished in 1967.
St John’s was hardly an architectural gem, despite being designed by J B Papworth, the distinguished architect responsible for much of Lansdown and Montpellier. It was consecrated in 1829 and like other churches in Cheltenham extended in the 19 century to accommodate a fast expanding congregation.
One of its incumbents, the Rev Valpy French, went on to be Bishop of Lahore.
From the first St John’s suffered from a lack of financial stability and by the 1950s the fabric was in dire need.
An appeal fund to raise £3,000 for essential repairs failed and the church was declared redundant. All was not entirely lost, however, as the reredos and other fittings were taken to St Luke’s where they remain to this day.
In Gloucester, if you’ve pondered St Mary de Crypt church when strolling along Southgate Street and thought the tower has an unfinished look, you’re right, it has.
In its original condition the tower was topped by a tall, ornate pinnacle at each corner, with castellated battlements running between them.
But by the turn of the last century the instability of these embellishments had become a cause of concern, so they were removed in 1908. The battlements have been stored in the church’s crypt ever since, while the pinnacles were removed to the garden of Barnwood Court, where they stand to this day.
Another city centre church with a truncated spire is St Nicholas. This 13th century structure was built on marshy ground and was probably never stable, so the spire, like the rest of the building, soon developed a pronounced list to the north. To make matters worse, the spire suffered damage in the civil war with the result that by the end of the 18th century the structure was unsafe. St Nic’s spire tip was topped in 1783 and pruned further in 1969 when the tower’s ornamental battlements were removed for safety reasons.
St Paul’s church in Park End Road was never given the tower its architect Capel N Trigg, the son of a Gloucester timber merchant, intended. Built in 1880, St Paul’s was consecrated as a memorial to Robert Raikes, founder of Sunday schools. It was to have a bold, square tower, but funds didn’t permit.
So what was supposed to be the tower has been the entrance porch ever since. Gloucester lost many fine buildings in the three decades after the Second World War. In fact the city’s biggest swinger in the 1960s was the demolition man’s hammer. The loss of Northgate Chapel was a particularly severe blow.
This Wesleyan place of worship, built in the Italianate style with spires rising from twin towers that flanked a central rose window, stood in Northgate Street facing Worcester Street. It was opened on June 13, 1878, but the site had been occupied previously by an earlier nonconformist chapel.
Unbelievably, Northgate Chapel was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for a new Woolworth’s, which in turn vacated to make room for Wilko.
Until it was demolished in 1921, St Catherine’s church stood adjacent to the remains of St Oswald’s Priory in Priory Road. Consecrated in 1868 and looking like many a red brick school of the Victorian era, the church was part funded by Gloucester’s MP Charles Monk and stood on the site of an earlier place of worship that was destroyed by fire in 1658.
St Catherine’s wasn’t in a well populated part of the city and the Gloucester Church Extension Society advised that it should be replaced. Consequently on June 21,1915 a new church dedicated to St Catharine was built at a cost of £15,000 at the top of Wotton Pitch, where it stands to this day. Why the spelling changed from Catherine to Catharine nobody knows.