Description

SUNDERLAND

NZ3956NE STOCKTON ROAD
920-1/20/212 (East side)
10/11/78 West Park United Reformed Church
(Formerly Listed as:
COWAN TERRACE
(South side)
West Park United Reformed Church)

GV II

Congregational church, now United Reformed Church. 1881-83. By
JP Pritchett. Coursed rock-faced stone with ashlar plinth and
dressings and red granite shafts; graduated Lakeland slate
roof with stone gable copings. E apsed chancel with
schoolrooms in 2-storey ambulatory; double transepts; aisled
nave; NW tower and SW porch with half-octagonal stair turret
projections. Late C14 style with geometric tracery.
EXTERIOR: steps up to W door, with tendril cast-iron hinges
and cross scutcheons, recessed in gabled projection between
nook-shafts in deep arch with dripmould above, and inner
rib-moulding resting on crocket capitals of intermediate
shafts. Crocketed gable over door; small windows at sides.
Similar treatment to smaller doors in flanking tower at left
and porch at right. Tall 5-light W window. 5-stage tower has
paired cusped lancets in second stage, 2-light third stage
window, clock in fourth, paired belfry openings in fifth with
nook-shafts and plate tracery; ashlar spire has 4 bands of
fish-scale patter, 2 levels of lucarnes, tall corner
spirelets. 2-light aisle windows and 3-light paired transept
windows on 2 levels, the lower cusped lights and the upper
cusped with tracery. 2 long windows to school stairs in
`ambulatory' which has paired cusped lights on 2 levels.
Polygonal hipped ambulatory roof from which rises
steeply-pitched hipped chancel roof with cusped tracery in big
2-light gabled lucarnes; paired gables on transepts;
steeply-pitched nave roof; pent stair turret roofs against
tower and porch.
INTERIOR shows meeting rooms and school rooms in ambulatory
have much original Gothic-style detail, including cast-iron
piers with octagonal base and fluted capital, stair balustrade
with twisted cast-iron balusters, 6-panelled doors including
pierced door to kitchen, dumb waiter, chimney-pieces, boarded
dado with wall bench, original heating system vents, levers
and vanes; upper central meeting room with hammer beam roof to
lucarnes. Chapel interior shows 5-light W window behind fine
Renaissance-style organ by Nelson & Co., Durham; high W
roll-moulded arch with inner arch on corbelled shafts. 2 tiers
of slender cast-iron piers with crocket capitals support
galleries along all 3 sides, the W over entrance vestibules;
upper arcades; plinths of upper piers painted with passion
flowers and scrolled names of virtues. Boarded hammer beam
roof. Deacons' seats below high quality central E pulpit of
fine ashlar stone with green marble shafts to blind pierced
arcade with much decorative carving in North Italian style;
shows some subsidence damage at time of survey.
High quality painted glass includes W window scene across all
5 panels, dated 1902, showing Christ in Glory; N transept
gallery Sermon on the Mount, and Christ's Charge to Peter and
John, signed Atkinson Bros.; N aisle window by J Eadie Reed
dated 1926. Also several C19 memorial slabs.
(Milburn GE and Miller ST: Sunderland River, Town and People:
Sunderland: 1988-: 159).

Listing NGR: NZ3951056518

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q26502300

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Pevsner's Architectural Glossary (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)
• 
  London 3: North West: North West v. 3 (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  A Buying and Owning a Listed Building: A Brief Guide
• 
  Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides): Written by Charles O'Brien, 2014 Edition, Publisher: Yale University Press [Hardcover]
• 
  Oxfordshire: North and West (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  [(Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough)] [By (author) Nikolaus Pevsner] published on (January, 1968)