Church of St Paul, Sandgate, Kent

Description

737/7/173 SANDGATE HILL
11-MAR-75 SANDGATE
(North side)
CHURCH OF ST PAUL

II
1849 by S S Teulon. 1915: minor restoration and removal of galleries by Temple Moore. 1919: W porch by C M Oldrid-Scott. 1923-5: bay added to the chancel to form a sanctuary and new W window.

MATERIALS: Yellow stock brick with sandstone dressings. Rendered W porch. Slate roofs.

PLAN: Nave, chancel, N and S aisles, W porch, N and S vestries.

EXTERIOR: The church is placed on a steep, S-facing slope. It's most prominent elevation is that on the S which is dominated by four transverse gables on the S aisle each containing a tall, uncusped, transomed window. The three easterly ones have two lights with a large circle in the head. The same style of windows appear on the N side too. Over the windows are small amounts of polychrome in the form of red bricks which, chiefly, serve to outline the heads of the windows. The W elevation is the next most prominent one and this has a broad five-light window of 1923-5 by Oldrid-Scott with a minimal amount of cusping at the top and wide mullions between the outer lights wide enough to take a tall, cusped recess each. Beneath the window is a stuccoed First World War memorial porch. The E ends of the aisles have three-light, cusped intersecting tracery and the chancel windows have two and three lights with varying 14th-century-style tracery. Over the W gable there are the remains of a bellcote which was taken down in 2008.

INTERIOR: The walls are plastered and whitened. Originally the church would have looked very different thanks to the presence of galleries, removed by Moore. Between the nave and aisles there are four-bay arcades with tall arches rising to just below the level of the roof. The arches have single chamfers and are carried on octagonal piers with moulded capitals but, unusually, with no bases. Wall-shafts rise from the capitals to carry the arch braces to the roof. The lower part of the roof has a coved section below raised tie-beams: above these the roof is five-sided. The chancel arch is broad and the arched head dies without capitals into the plain responds. Further E there is a simple arch to the sanctuary. Both the choir and sanctuary areas have roofs which are divided into panels. A feature of the church is the decoration of the roofs which is the work of Charles Powell and dates from 1927-36: the nave coving has the Instruments of the Passion, the choir various emblems of worship and thanksgiving against a greenish ground while the chancel has a blue ground with stars.

PRINCIPAL FIXTURES: The Victorian nave seating scheme with shaped bench ends is largely intact, as are the 20th-century stalls. The chancel has graded sedilia. At the entrance to the chancel the low screen dates from 1925. The font is octagonal with quatrefoil decoration on each face of the bowl. A number of windows are filled with 20th-century stained glass. The E and W windows are both by Robert Anning Bell and date from 1923 and 1925 respectively. That at the E end of the N aisle is by Leonard Walker, 1935. The two tier N aisle NE window is by Wallace Wood and the two phases are or 1958 and 1965. There is Victorian stained glass in the SW corner of the church.

HISTORY: St Paul's was built in 1849 to replace an earlier chapel. The first `Sandgate Episcopal Chapel' had been built by the earl of Darnley at his own expense: it was consecrated on 28 May 1822. Sandgate developed rapidly after the coming of the railway in 1843 and the new, larger church was a consequence. It was built in 1849 and accommodated 890 people. The church remained a chapel of ease until 1888 when it gained parish status. The architect, Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812-73), was a well-known and active church architect who worked primarily for Low Church clients, he himself being a devout Evangelical. He was responsible for some 114 new churches, `recastings' and restorations. His work is often made striking by the use of structural polychromy and exotic architectural details. At St Paul's he uses the striking features of transverse gables on the aisles and introduces a little polychromy several years before it came into widespread currency.

SOURCES:
A H Gibson, The Parish Church of St Paul, Sandgate, Kent (guide leaflet, c1970s)
Matthew Saunders, The Churches of S S Teulon, 1982, p 45
John Newman, The Buildings of England: Kent, North East and East, 1983, p 444.
Geoffrey Brandwood, Temple Moore: an Architect of the Late Gothic Revival, 1997, p 241

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION:
The church of St Paul, Sandgate, is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It is of special interest as a Gothic Revival church of the late 1840s by S S Teulon, a well-known and inventive church architect in Victorian England. The church shows how by the late 1840s architects were leaving behind the faithful medieval copyism of the mid-1840s and starting to develop Gothic architecture in novel ways, hence the rather unmedieval use of transverse gables and the introduction of a little polychrome
* The church has interesting decorative work and stained glass dating from the early 20th century.

TR2073135292

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Church of St Paul

A Grade II Listed Building in Sandgate, Kent

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