St. John's Church in Ranmoor

 

A view to the west from the chancel

 

For my last day tip in July, following a very enjoyable day out to Dewsbury, where I had a great insight into the development of the railways in West Yorkshire, the textile industry in general and added the words shoddy and mungo to my vocabulary, I returned to Ranmoor in Sheffield to further prepare for a talk that I had been asked to give to the Ranmoor Society later in the year.

 

A view of St. John's church from Fulwood Road

 

At the beginning of the year, I had explored a part of Ranmoor and stopped at the Grade II* Listed Church of St. John the Evangelist to take a few photos in the bright January sunshine. The Secretary, Gerald Eveleigh, had since invited me to have a short walk around the old village of Ranmoor, to show me a few points of interest. 

 

A view east along the nave

 

Having turned up several minutes early at the arranged meeting point outside the porch of the church, and then being informed by Gerald that his No. 120 bus from Sheffield was running late, I took advantage of it being unexpectedly open for a service and had a very quick look around the interior before it began. 

 

The north arcade

On my previous visits, I was very interested to see that the dressings to the exterior, including a substantial amount of masonry to the steeple and porch, were made of Ancaster limestone from Lincolnshire. Although I would expect to find this stone used for dressings in the East Midlands and have often encountered it in repairs to several churches that are built with Magnesian Limestone, I can’t recall seeing it used in Sheffield. 

 

A view west along the nave

The original church was built in 1879 to a design by Edward Mitchel Gibbs and, except for the tower, was rebuilt in 1887 after a great fire to a design by Gibbs, who was now a partner in the practice of Flockton and Gibbs. By this time, very high quality medium grained sandstone from as far as Matlock in Derbyshire and Huddersfield - 25 km and 35 km respectively as the crow flies – had been used in many of Sheffield’s high quality buildings. 

 

The south arcade

 

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the late Early English Gothic style church as being “opulent outside and inside” and the inclusion of a triforium in the design is, in my experience, a characteristic of a mediaeval cathedral or abbey and very unusual in a parish church of any age. 

 

The chancel

 

Much to my great surprise, I discovered that the interior of the church is built completely in Ancaster limestone, which would have been brought into Sheffield by train from Ancaster by a very circuitous route that involves a journey of well over 100 km and which would presumably have entailed considerable carriage costs. 

 

The chancel

 

John Newton Mappin, who made his fortune from brewing, funded the building of the original church, but a report in the September 15th 1888 edition of the John Bull magazine states that the new building - with only the offset tower remaining - differed from it in nearly every respect. It further mentions that an insurance payment of £9400 was made within days of the fire and that the cost of the new church amounted to £14,000. 

 

A foliated capital

Apart from the grand scale of the church, Gibbs commissioned the eminent sculptor Frank Tory to undertake the stone carving, which is of the highest quality and includes the foliated capitals to the arcades, various corbels and the many shafts that can be seen in the nave and the aisles. 

 

A foliated corbel

 

I spent less than 15 minutes inside the church, 5 of which were spent talking to the vicar about the spire, where the sandstone is apparently in an advanced state of decay. This is often a problem when sandstone is used together with limestone, particularly where sulphurous pollutants in industrial areas have reacted with the limestone to form calcium sulphate, which dissolves in rainwater and runs down the masonry and recrystallises within the pores of the sandstone. 

 

A distant view of the reredos

 

The reredos, which I didn’t see closely, was also carved by Frank Tory and is made with alabaster and, according to the same edition of John Bull, Caen stone from Normandy in France. This limestone is rarely used in the north of England and was first used in the south not along after the Norman Conquest in 1066 – with Canterbury Cathedral and the White Tower in London being notable examples of its use. 

 

Decorative stones used for the floor of the chancel

Whilst at the east end of the church, I took a few photographs of the decorative stones that have been used for flooring in the chancel, which I presume to be original. It is probable that the white marble is from Carrara in Italy, with polished black Carboniferous limestone of unknown provenance used in strips and what looks like Cork Red Marble - an iron stained Carboniferous limestone from Co. Cork in the Republic of Ireland. 

 

A detail of the pulpit

The pulpit (1888) is made of Ancaster limestone, with red marble columns and a polished black limestone moulded course above the floriated detailing. Returning to the west end of the church, I was very interested to see that, with the sun shining on the columns of the north arcade, the Ancaster limestone has a distinct pink colouration in several places. 

 

Ancaster limestone with pink colouration

 

When cutting Ancaster stone at the Gregory's Quarry in Mansfield more than 25 years ago, I noticed several offcuts of pink Ancaster limestone lying around the yard and, although it is normally very pale cream to almost white in colour, the pink variation does randomly appear in the various quarries from time to time. 

 

The triforium at the west end of the nave

 

Returning to the west end, the triforium seen below the clerestory in the nave is repeated, with further examples of Frank Tory’s excellent sculptural work in the form of floriated corbels and headstops at the base of the decorative shafts. At ground level, the baptistry contains a limestone font of an unknown date, which has marble columns that I couldn’t see very well in the low level of light and which I will have to investigate further during my next visit to this magnificent  chuch.

The font