Wood’s church to showcase festival
ONE of our borough’s architectural gems is Long Street Methodist Church, Middleton.
This arts and crafts style building was designed by architect Edgar Wood and opened in 1901.
It is soon to be the venue for a concert by The Mendelssohn on Mull Festival Ensemble, featuring works by Mendelssohn, Haydn and Shostakovich.
Members of the Edgar Wood Society have volunteered to show concert-goers around the building from 1.30pm and there will be an exhibition on the Northern Art Workers Guild in the church hall.
The Edgar Wood Society was formed in April 2011 as Friends of The Edgar Wood Centre.
For three years it developed the ideas of the arts and crafts church and the Middleton Edgar Wood Centre as the ‘centre’ of Edgar Wood’s work and career.
In 2014, the name changed to the Edgar Wood Society to reflect a wider interest in the life and times of Edgar Wood.
Edgar Wood (1860 to 1935) was an architect, artist and draftsman who practised from Manchester at the turn of the 20th century and gained a reputation in the United Kingdom.
He was regarded as a proponent of the arts and crafts movement which was prevalent between 1860 and 1910.
Wood’s work is principally domestic, but he designed several churches and small commercial buildings.
He worked as an individual designer, mostly with only one assistant, and confined himself to the smaller type of building that he could control personally.
Although he was active in Manchester for more than 20 years, most of his work is in nearby towns, such as Rochdale, Oldham and Middleton (of which he was native).
He was a founder of the Northern Art Workers’ Guild in 1896, one of the major provincial societies within the arts and crafts movement and was president of the Manchester Society of Architects from 1911 to 1912.
Wood retired in 1921 and 21 of his architectural works are listed.
The Mendelssohn on Mull Festival was founded in 1988 by the revered violinist Leonard Friedman, responsible for so much of lasting value in Scotland’s musical life.
The festival provides young professionals in the field of string chamber music with a week of preparation and performance in which to develop their skills, while working with established artists in the surroundings of natural beauty that drew Mendelssohn to Scotland.