Reasons for Designation
The Chapel of the Sacred Heart is designated at Grade II, for the following principal reasons:
* The chapel is a well-designed and well-executed building by the architect Thomas Henry Wyatt for the 8th Earl of Denbigh
* It dates from 1877-80, when Wyatt was redesigning the Earl's home at Newnham Paddox, on whose estate the chapel is situated
* The building is a high-quality, French-inspired composition, expressing the Earl's Catholic faith in his family chapel
* The exuberant exterior is complemented by the good quality polychrome interior scheme, which includes a highly-decorated apse
* The chapel is intimately connected with its setting, playing a key role in the landscape design of the small cemetery in which it sits
Details
MONKS KIRBY
1726/0/10003 SANDY LANE
22-JUL-08 CHAPEL OF THE SACRED HEART
II
A cemetery chapel in a French Baroque style, built in 1888, but designed 1877-80 by Thomas Henry Wyatt for the 8th Earl of Denbigh.
MATERIALS: The building is constructed from roughcast rendered brick, with plain clay tile roofs and a copper-clad spirelet; the dressings are of limestone.
PLAN: The body of the chapel is rectangular, with an apsidal east end. There is a small vestry attached to the north.
EXTERIOR: The building is a single storey structure, with relatively steep roofs, and a central timber bellcote topped with a spirelet. The whole is set on a slightly projecting plinth. The entrance is in the west end, set under a timber canopy porch on carved, scrolled timber brackets; the double doors are elaborately panelled. There are heavy stone buttresses with scrolled tops set along the north and south sides. The south side has two gabled dormers, each with a two-light timber casement window, having carved timber decoration at their tops. Much of the leaded glass has been lost. The north side has similar windows, and a large stone mullioned window of three lights, each with foliate carved tops.
INTERIOR: The interior is simple, with a continuous frieze of text and painted plaster decoration in floral motifs running around the body of the chapel. The entrance doors have a segmental arched top set under a classical timber doorcasing. The apsidal end has an impressively-decorated half-dome, set behind a wide, semi-circular arch, which has a gilt inscription; the intrados is decorated with painted and stencilled geometric patterns. The half-dome is gilt, with a flared mandorla motif at its centre. Below the half-dome, the apse is completely decorated with painted and stencilled geometric patterns, predominantly red and pale blue-green on a white ground; each element contains alternating inscriptions PAX/SPES/RIP/IHS. There is a classical pink and white marble altar and altar back in the apse, set on a moulded pink marble plinth; the altar back is inscribed EGO SUM RESURRECTIO VITA. To the right of the altar is a carved stoup, and another is situated adjacent to the entrance doorway. The entrance to the vestry has an elaborate stone doorcase with moulded architrave, having an elliptical arched opening, dentil frieze and scrolled decoration in the spandrels. The vestry has a stencilled anthemion frieze as a cornice and continuing around its rectangular window opening. The roof trusses spring from scrolled corbels, and are ceiled above the collars, which have continuous arched braces and decorative elements to form a keyed segmental arch.
HISTORY: The chapel is situated just on the western edge of the Newnham Paddox estate, seat of the Earls of Denbigh. The estate has belonged since 1433 to the Feilding family; in the late C16 or early C17 they built or rebuilt a large, rambling house, perhaps timber framed, at a time when the family's fortunes were on the rise. This culminated in Sir William Feilding's elevation to the peerage, who was created Baron Feilding in 1620 and Earl of Denbigh in 1622. The 5th Earl, after living abroad for many years, returned to Newnham Paddox in 1741, and immediately set about modernising his house and garden. The Earl was a friend of Lord Cobham, who was laying out his celebrated gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and Denbigh 'borrowed' Cobham's garden designer, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, to work at Newnham Paddox on what became one of Brown's earliest commissions, beginning work in 1746. Brown also created an austerely classical house from 1754, set in a typical Brownian landscape, where the earlier formal pools and canals were turned into a serpentine lake. During the time of the 8th Earl of Denbigh, who had succeeded to the title in 1865 and had benefited from money realised through the sale of his wife's estate, the house was largely rebuilt by Thomas Henry Wyatt (1807-1880) in a rather elaborate French Baroque style. Wyatt had already worked on a church at Pantasaph in Flintshire for Lord Denbigh, and his designs for Newnham Paddox were carried out in 1876-9. At the same time, Wyatt designed the cemetery chapel, known as the Chapel of the Sacred Heart, for Lord Denbigh, who had converted to Catholicism. The house at Newnham Paddox was demolished in 1952, but the estate and the chapel remain in the ownership of the Earls of Denbigh.
REASONS FOR DESIGNATION DECISION:
The Chapel of the Sacred Heart is listed Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* The chapel is a well-designed and well-executed building by the architect Thomas Henry Wyatt for the 8th Earl of Denbigh
* It dates from 1877-80, when Wyatt was redesigning the Earl's home at Newnham Paddox, on whose estate the chapel is situated
* The building is a high-quality, French-inspired composition, expressing the Earl's Catholic faith in his family chapel
* The exuberant exterior is complemented by the good quality polychrome interior scheme, which includes a highly-decorated apse
* The chapel is intimately connected with its setting, playing a key role in the landscape design of the small cemetery in which it sits
SOURCES:
John Martin Robinson, The Wyatts: An Architectural Dynasty (1979) 267
Geoffrey Tyack, Warwickshire Country Houses (1994) 148-151
