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A view up the tower and the spire |
When I first saw the St. John's church in Ranmoor, back in September 2018, I was particularly interested in the use of Ancaster limestone for the dressings, which is very unusual for Sheffield, but I didn’t take too much notice of the sandstone used for the fabric.
On my next visit on a bright sunny day in January 2022, it was the first step in my preparation of a talk that I had been been ask to give for the Ranmoor Society later that year, so I took a much closer look at the sandstone and was surprised to see that it is of a very inferior quality and that there is extensive spalling of the surface.
Having spent much of my time in 2021 visiting all of the existing Sheffield Board Schools, when I also took good note of the surrounding historic buildings, I acquired a very good working knowledge of the building stones of Sheffield and the physical characteristics of the geological formations from which they were once quarried.
I visited again in April 2022, when undertaking further research for my talk, but I was still quite puzzled by this sandstone because I couldn’t recall seeing anything like it in any of the fine architect designed historic buildings in Sheffield, which I had by now been photographing as part of the British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge.
When the original church was built in 1879 by E. M. Gibbs and then rebuilt in 1888, high quality medium grained sandstones from Derbyshire and West Yorkshire had been widely used in very many of Sheffield’s prestigious buildings, which are still in very good condition today. It is therefore surprising to see such a poor stone used for its exterior, when Ancaster limestone had been brought in from Lincolnshire at great expense for use in the interior.
In July, when waiting for the Secretary of the Ranmoor Society, I had a conversation with the vicar, Revd Dr Matthew Rhodes, who told me that the sandstone in the interior of the spire had been deteriorating at an alarming rate and that this had been attributed by the architect to the mixture of limestone and sandstone.
This is usually associated with very high levels of atmospheric pollution in industrial areas, where acid rain reacts with limestone to form calcium sulphate, a highly soluble salt that dissolves, runs down the masonry and recrystallises with great force within the pores of the sandstone.
This is mentioned in my copy of The Weathering of Natural Building Stones by R.J. Schaffer, a seminal book which was published by the Building Research Station (now the Building Research Establishment) back in 1933, but which I think is still very relevant and explains so much of what I have seen in countless stone buildings throughout my working life.
Although I have not been inside the spire and cannot see the condition of its exterior, on the south elevation at ground level I can see instances where limestone overlies sandstone, the church is upwind of the polluting steelworks that were based in the Lower Don Valley and the extent of the decay of the sandstone cannot be explained by calcium sulphate or calcium carbonate, which dissolves in water that has dissoved in rainwater, crystallising in its pores.
When subsequently asked by Mary Grover to contribute to her Scissors Paper Stone project, which included a talk - The Stones of St John’s – A Geological Assessment – she explained that there were no records of the rebuilt church, which were probably destroyed when the building contractor went bankrupt and Lawrence and William Bissett fled to the continent with company funds, never to be seen in Sheffield again.
Quarries on the Loxley Edge Rock around Oughtibridge |
The only reference to the materials used was in a cutting from the Sheffield Telegraph, which reported on the opening of the church in 1888 that the walling stone was from Oughtibridge and the dressings from Ancaster. Looking at old Ordnance Survey maps and the Building Stones Database for England map explorer, quarries at Middlewood and Hagg Stones worked the Loxley Edge Rock, with the latter being the largest of these.
The year before, during a day out to Worrall and Oughtibridge, I visited the Hagg Stones quarry and collected specimens of the Loxley Edge Rock. When visiting St. John’s church in June, to photograph the decorative stones of its interior, I brought these specimens along and was interested to see how they compared with the sandstone used for its fabric, which is predominantly medium grained and well bedded.
With a larger coarse grained sample from a massive bed at Haggs Stone quarry and a smaller finer/medium sample from the flaggy beds, I compared their colour and texture against several sections of walling, including one that contained a very coarse grained block that was more typical of the rock that I had seen at the type locality along Loxley Edge. Although not conclusive, the general match in colour and texture between the walling and the samples was actually quite good