Church of St Barnabas

Details

795/17/165 ST BARNABAS ROAD 01-MAR-74 CHURCH OF ST BARNABAS

II 1882-4 by Carpenter and Ingelow. 1891: N aisle, vestries, organ chamber and tower. In the mid-C20 the red brick walls of the interior were plastered (the work in the nave and aisles was done in 1957 under C H Runnalls as part of a general restoration).

MATERIALS: Red brick laid in English bond with limestone dressings. Welsh slate roofs with ornamental cresting on the ridge tiles of most of the roofs. Timber top to tower and shingled spirelet.

PLAN: Nave, N and S aisles, W narthex-porch, chancel, S chapel, NE porch, vestries and small tower with spirelet.

EXTERIOR: The E end presents three gables to the road, each differently treated in terms of its fenestration. The chancel, wider and higher than the flanking S chapel and vestry blocks, has a broad five-light window with Geometrical tracery. The S chapel has a two-light Ewindow with a quatrefoil in the head where as the northerly gable has an E windowof three cusped lights with a pair of quatrefoils above and, unusually no hood framing them. The side walls of the aisles have-two-light windows with quatrefoils in their heads. At the W end the nave and flanking aisles are placed under their own gables (the nave being higher), and running across the nave and S aisle is a narthex-porch with N, S and central doorways, the latter under a gable head which breaks the eaves line. On the N side rising out of the vestry/organ chamber block is an octagonal turret with a louvred timber top, capped by a shingled spirelet.

INTERIOR: The interior walls are is now plastered and whitened and the character of the building is low and spreading thanks to a wide nave and chancel and the lack of a clerestory. Between the nave and aisles are arcades of five bays which have double-chamfered arches with hoods and quatrefoil piers with fillets in the hollows. The chancel is as wide as the nave and between the two is a broad arch which largely fills the E wall of the nave. There is a two-bay arcade from the chancel to the S chapel. The roofs are quite modest, that in the nave having arch-braces with scissor-braces above the apices of the arches: this roof is in three tiers and has wind-braces in the lower two of these. The chancel roof is of plain keeled construction and is divided into square panels by ribs. The aisle roofs are of similar construction to that in the nave.

PRINCIPAL FIXTURES: At the E end of the chancel the reredos has a band of painted angles set between polygonal projections which house niches with stone figures of saints. The pewing has shouldered ends and is largely complete although some seating has been removed, for example, from the E end of the S aisle and W end of the N aisle. The circular font on a clustered column base and the stalls are quite modest pieces. The organ case with a series of panels of pipes stands before an arch on the N side of the chancel. The E window, depicting the Sermon on the Mount spread across the five lights, is a good example of late, pictorial glass by the firm of Morris and Co.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: The former schools immediately to the NW were begun before 1882 and extended in 1897. Now used as parish rooms, the building has some low-key Gothic detail and gables with slate hanging.

HISTORY: The church was built to provide a place of Anglican worship for the expanding population of this area of Sutton. Richard Herbert Carpenter (1841-93) was the son of the important early Victorian church architect R C Carpenter who died young in 1855. The elder Carpenter's practice was taken over by William Slater who was joined as a partner by Carpenter junior in 1863. On Slater's death in 1872, Carpenter took on as a partner Benjamin Ingelow (d.1925), who had been an improver and assistant to Slater. R H Carpenter's masterwork is his magisterial Lancing College chapel in Sussex, begun in 1868.

SOURCES: Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, 1983, p 655.

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The church of St Barnabas, Sutton is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It is a late C19 red-brick aisled church in a Gothic Revival style by a well-known architectural practice. * It contains various contemporary fixtures and has a good C20 stained glass E window by Morris and Co.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

206794

Legacy System:

LBS

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