Christ Church in Stannington

 

The west front of Christ Church

The next stop during my brief exploration of Stannington, having already photographed 8 of the 11 listed buildings on my walk for the British Listed Buildings website, was to have a very quick look at the exterior of Christ Church, built in 1830 to the Gothic style design of William Hurst of the Doncaster based architects, Woodhead and Hurst. 

 

The west front

As with every historic building that I had seen on my walk to date, I didn’t closely look at the stonework, but the Historic England listing describes this element of the building as “Coarse gritstone blocks each with punched finish and draughted margins, finely tooled dressings, graduated Welsh slate roof.” 

 

A general view

It is very unusual for the listing description to contain information about the masonry finishes, but the writer has obviously taken a closer look at the building than most and, although the Loxley Edge Rock and the Crawshaw Sandstone do possess very coarse varieties, the locally quarried Chatsworth Grit (formerly known as Rivelin Grit) soon becomes recognisable to anyone who spends time examining the historic buildings of Sheffield. 

 

A view of the east end and the south aisle

Looking from a distance, although the church is quite blackened and the colour of the stone is largely obscured, the exposed castellated turrets have a patina that it is quite grey in colour, which is a feature of a lot of the Chatsworth Grit that I have seen – including the former Blue Coat School and St. Georges’s church, which are also by Woodhead and Hurst. 

 

A granite memorial

I wanted to find the Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone of Private D.S. Oliver of the Royal Army Medical Corps but, before I went to ask a man who was trimming a tree about its location, with whom I had a good long conversation about the ganister and fireclay that was extracted in the vicinity, I came across a large tomb made out of English grey granite. 

 

A granite memorial

Various granites from the Cornubian batholith, which is spectacularly exposed in the tors of Cornwall and Devon, were once supplied in great quantities to build river embankments and bridges in London, docks throughout south-east England, lighthouses and various memorials. 

 

A detail of the granite

Although I am not an expert on the different granites from the region, the large phenocrysts of white alkali feldspar set within a finer grained quartz and black biotite and/or pale grey muscovite matrix make them quite easily recognisable; however, what I find interesting here is that the tomb actually dates to 1949 and not to the late Victorian/Edwardian heyday of monumental architecture. 

 

The headstone of Private S.R. Horton

I never did find the headstone of Private Oliver, which I learned 14 months later is probably a recumbent slab or a private memorial, but I unexpectedly discovered the Portland stone headstone for Private S. R. Horton of the Duke of Wellington Regiment, with its cut shoulders indicating that it is in fact a Ministry of Defence headstone. 

 

Restored tracery in the east window of the chancel

Continuing with my investigation of the exterior of Christ Church, I noted that the tracery to the east window of the chancel has been largely replaced with a buff coloured stone, which looks like one of the gritty sandstones from the Millstone Grit Group of Derbyshire or West Yorkshire. 

 

A view of the east end and north aisle

 

Walking around to the north aisle, I noticed that the some of the window dressings, as with those on the south aisle, look quite different to the grey castellated towers and similar to the restored tracery. This provides an example of how important it is to undertake an inspection with the naked eye, rather than rely on petrographic analysis under the microscope, when practising the ‘art of stone matching’.  

A detail of the bell tower