Roman Catholic Church of The Holy Rosary, Fitton Hill, Medlock Vale, Oldham

Summary

Roman Catholic church and mural. Church 1954-1955 by W & J B Ellis and Partners, mural 1955 by George Mayer-Marton. Campanile rebuilt at unknown date. The attached presbytery and link block are not of special interest.

Description

MATERIALS: the church and presbytery are built of buff brick with concrete tiles. The mixed-media mural comprises mosaic of tiles of coloured glass smalti and gold leaf tesserae and fresco of blue grisaille (single-colour) paint.

PLAN: the church is aligned north-south, but liturgical compass points will be used for the description.

The church has an unaisled nave. At the liturgical west end (north) is an inner entrance porch in the south-west corner, a former baptistery with a small balcony over, and a north-west lobby for the north-west door, baptistery and balcony staircase. At the liturgical east end (south) is the sanctuary containing the mural, with a small Lady Chapel to the left. To the rear are confessionals and two sacristries.

EXTERIOR: the liturgical west end faces Fir Tree Avenue. The eight-bay church is built of buff brick in Flemish bond to the east and west gable walls and stretcher bond to the side elevations, which have raking brick buttresses to express the bays. The nave, sanctuary and sacristies are under a single double-pitched roof with overhanging eaves and corrugated concrete tiles.

The main entrance is a segmental-arched doorway with timber double doors in the south-west corner with an external, flagged platform with a flat, timber canopy over connecting the building to the otherwise free-standing campanile. The square, brick campanile has a gabled top, with louvres to the north and south sides and a statue niche with a statue of Mary on the south side. The nave is lit by steel horizontal rows of windows at eaves level to north and south elevations. Towards the right-hand, east end of the south elevation a flight of parallel steps leads up to a doorway, now sealed, with the link block abutting the south-east corner at a right-angle. The north elevation has a doorway towards the right-hand, north-west end, now sealed. At the left-hand end vertical rectangular windows light the Lady Chapel and sacristy. A triangular dormer window in the roof lights the sanctuary.

The gabled west elevation has a tall, central window with a stained glass panel of Christ’s Baptism, lighting the baptistery, a vertical timber panel separating it from the upper stained glass scene of the Virgin and Child. To the right are paired vertical rectangular windows, now blocked, and a commemorative plaque of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Heaton Park, Manchester. The gabled east elevation has a central doorway, now sealed, with paired steps up and vertical rectangular windows to each side lighting the sacristies.

INTERIOR: the walls are of fair-faced brick and the seven-bay nave is articulated with flush pilasters of vertical bricks; the Stations of the Cross formerly attached to the walls have been removed. The steel roof trusses are expressed as fins below the roof soffit and the roof between is lined with boarded panels. The nave, entrance porch and lobby are tiled in square quarry tiles. The west end of the nave has a wide doorway with a segmental-arched head and double doors from the entrance porch on the left-hand side and two similar segmental-arched openings on the right-hand side leading through to the lobby, baptistery and a narrow staircase to the central, first-floor balcony. The former baptistery has a similar segmental-arched opening, later infilled with timber panelling and a single door. The balcony has a metal railing and to the rear is the stained glass window of the Virgin and Child. At the east end of the nave is the sanctuary with a wide, segmental-arched opening. To the left is the small Lady Chapel and to the right is a segmental-arched opening leading to the confessionals, one of the sacristies and a staircase. Adjacent to this is a blocked external doorway.

The sanctuary has a slate altar platform floor and a new forward altar. The side walls are of brick with the foundation stone set into the north wall and a doorway through to the second sacristy. Above is the dormer window lighting the east wall (presently boarded up). The south wall has a shallow, segmental-arched blind doorway.

On the east wall the mosaic of Christ on the Cross stands approximately 7.5m high and 5m across. Christ has the straight-legged pose of Christ Triumphant (Christus Triumphans), often found in C12 cand C13 Italian art, though the bowed head is reminiscent of the Suffering Christ (Christus Patiens) of Eastern Christian tradition. The slender body is articulated by the use of many-coloured smalti (small rectangular tiles of handmade opaque glass), his bearded head surrounded by a golden halo of gold-leaf inlaid glass tesserae. The figure is set against a deep blue cross with the tiles of the cross within a bordering metal frame, and a backdrop of a shimmering golden mandorla (upright almond shape found chiefly in medieval art enclosing Christ or Saints). Historic photographs show the fresco blends the figures of Mary to the left and St John the Apostle to the right with an abstract backdrop of cubist shapes, perhaps representing a landscape or the night sky and heavens darkening as described in the New Testament. The figures have sinuous poses and draperies. The uncovered trial areas show their faces to be intact except where the mosaic haloes have been removed, as is the small, uncovered area of St John’s robes. The original technique used is clearly visible with incised lines cut into the fresh plaster to set out the design and thin transparent paint layers.

This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 11 August 2022 to correct a typo in the Reason for designation

History

Fitton Hill is a large post-war housing estate on the south side of Oldham. The first mission was set up by Fr Buckley, an assistant priest at St Patrick’s, Oldham, who arranged for the purchase of land in 1940, before the new housing was built. Once the new estate began to be developed, Fr Buckley said Mass in an upper room in Marple Mill while the church was built.

The church was designed by W & J B Ellis and Partners, an architects’ practice based in Manchester and St Helens and known predominantly for their ecclesiastical designs in the north-west of England. The foundation stone was laid on 2 October 1954 by Bishop Marshall and the church was officially opened in July 1955. The sanctuary east wall was covered by a Crucifixion mosaic and mural commissioned from George Mayer-Marton. The large-scale mosaic of Christ on the Cross was flanked by Mary and St John the Apostle in blue grisaille (single-colour) fresco with gold mosaic haloes. The mosaic used the Byzantine face (or facetted) technique with the tesserae set into wet lime mortar with multiple angled surfaces to catch the light, and the fresco was painted in “true” or buon fresco, painted on wet plaster and chemically bonding with the wall surface, as used in medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Initial plans of the church did not show a campanile, but one was built which became unstable in strong winds and had to be rebuilt at an unknown date. The attached presbytery was built around 1970. In 2009 the parishes of Holy Rosary and Holy Family were merged, and in 2017 Holy Rosary was closed following a Diocesan review.

Mayer-Marton was a Hungarian Jew, born in Gyor in 1897. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, he studied art at academies in Vienna and Munich, and Byzantine mosaic in Ravenna. Settling in Vienna, he became the vice-president of the important and progressive Hagenbund group of artists between the Wars, who had an interest in the unity of architecture and art seen in the British Arts and Crafts movement and the German-Austrian tradition of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art linking painting, architecture, word and music). Mayer-Marton would have known the mixed media of early-C20 Viennese work, such as Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, murals of other Hagenbund artists such as Heinrich Lefler and Josef Urban and ecclesiastical frescos at the same period of the Beuron artists in France, Italy and Germany, who contributed to the 1905 Vienna Secession exhibition.

In 1938, following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Germany), Mayer-Marton and his wife fled to Britain; the Nazis subsequently destroyed all his pre-war frescoes in Austria and his family, who remained in Hungary, perished in the Holocaust. While in London in 1940 his studio was hit by an incendiary bomb destroying much of his work. Mayer-Marton worked as a lecturer for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), predecessor of the Arts Council until 1952. He was then appointed senior lecturer at the Liverpool College of Art where he established the Department of Mural Art, the first of its kind in Britain. After his appointment, Mayer-Marton received a number of ecclesiastical commissions: a mosaic font for the Anglican Church of St Michael and All Angels, Tettenhall (1955); the Crucifixion mosaic and mural for Holy Rosary (1955); a Pentecost mosaic for the Holy Ghost, Netherton (1957, relocated to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral in 1989); a mosaic of St Clare for the Franciscan Church of St Clare, Blackley (1958); a mosaic font for the Anglican Church of Holy Trinity, Barnoldswick (1960). Mayer-Marton died in Liverpool in 1960. His artworks are held in collections including the British Museum, the V&A, the Scottish National Gallery, Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, and the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna (Austrian National Gallery), who held a retrospective of his work in 1986.

The fresco component of George Mayer-Marton’s artwork was painted over with off-white emulsion paint during the 1980s. Uncovering trials in 2019, and more extensively in 2021, (Opus Conservation), demonstrated that the original fresco remained in good condition beneath the emulsion layer, a pinkish plaster skim and a blue repaint applied to make the original colour brighter. The integrity of the uncovered areas demonstrated that removal of the applied layers was possible and strongly suggested that the rest of the scheme remains largely intact. It was confirmed that the gold mosaic haloes of Mary and St John the Apostle had been removed prior to the application of the plaster skim.

Reasons for Listing

The RC Church of the Holy Rosary of 1954 to 1955 containing the Crucifixion mural by George Mayer-Marton of 1955 is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* the mural is highly unusual and possibly unique in this country in its striking aesthetic combination of Neo-Byzantine mosaic and modernist Cubist-influenced fresco inventively applied to traditional Christian iconography in a deeply personal evocation of suffering and redemption;

* the transcendent spiritual nature of Christ is heightened by the use of glittering mosaic for the figure and golden mandorla, contrasting with the figures of Mary and St John in earthbound, monochrome blue fresco;

* the quality of materials and level of craftmanship is clear in the skilled use of historic Byzantine techniques in the application of facetted tesserae to catch the light and of true fresco bonded to the wet plaster in the manner of Renaissance masters;

* as a major piece in the body of work of notable Hungarian-Jewish artist George Mayer-Marton, an integral member of the progressive Hagenbund group in Vienna before the war, whose knowledge of modernist central European art informed his subsequent work here;

* the altarpiece mural is physically and symbolically integrated into the architectural design of the church in the German-Austrian tradition of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) which formed part of Mayer-Marton’s cultural heritage.

Historic interest:
* Mayer-Marton was one of a generation of émigré artists who came to Britain following Nazi persecution whose artistic contribution was to enrich and diversify the post-war ecclesiastical and secular art of this country;

* Holy Rosary is representative of the expansion in church building after the Second World War, specifically as part of the infrastructure of post-war housing estates where they provided both a sense of continuity to their relocated urban communities and formed local landmarks within the expanse of houses.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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