St Augustine's Church, Penarth

St Augustine's Church

St Augustine's Church is a Grade I-listed Gothic Revival nineteenth-century parish church in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales.

History

The church was commissioned by Harriet Windsor-Clive, 13th Baroness Windsor[1] to replace a ruinous medieval church which was no longer large enough for the growing parish.[2] The building was designed by architect William Butterfield and built between 1865 and 1866,[3] at the cost of £10,000. The building became Grade I listed on 4 April 1989 as the church is "this important architect's most ambitious building in Wales, an unspoilt textbook example of high Victorian church architecture."[1]

Description

The church was designed in the a spare Early English version of the then-popular Gothic Revival style with a prominent saddleback tower. The walls have Leckwith limestone facings, bath stone dressings and bands, and red Staffordshire tiles. The gables have parapets and are surmounted by carved crucifix finials and moulded kneelers. The buttresses are low and set back with steep set-offs. The four-storey tower has a corbelled saddle, corner buttresses, and triple arcades to the lower storey. The interior has polychrome brick patterns and bath stone dressings on red bricks. The stilted low-pitch chancel roof has stellar-pattern ribs and crenellated wall plates; the nave roof is steeper with wall posts to the main trusses.[1]

John Newman described the new church as "one of Butterfield's finest churches, big boned and austere outside, highly charged in the polychromatic patterning of its interior".[3]

References

  1. 1 2 3 St Augustine's Parish Church, Church Place, Penarth, britishlistedbuildings.co.uk, retrieved 2016-04-30
  2. St Augustine's Church. William Butterfield (1814–1900). 1865., Victorianweb.org, retrieved 2013-09-28
  3. 1 2 Newman, John (1995). The Buildings of Wales: Glamorgan. Penguin Group. pp. 94–95. ISBN 0-14-071056-6.

External links

Coordinates: 51°26′29″N 3°10′09″W / 51.4415°N 3.1691°W / 51.4415; -3.1691

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