Churches

Let me take you down the subway at the roundabout which links Eyre Street, St. Mary’s Road, Bramall Lane, and St. Mary’s Gate. Once you get into its tree-lined centre, stop for a moment, and consider that several decades ago you would have been standing in the corner of a graveyard.

It is true.

The construction of Sheffield’s ring road required the widening of St. Mary’s Road and a roundabout. It meant that the graveyard at St. Mary’s Church was deprived of land, and where graves once stood, the subway has become a popular route for students and football fans journeying to Bramall Lane. Come down here at night at your peril because it is also the haunt of muggers and the like.

In a few years’ time, St. Mary’s Church will celebrate its bicentenary and where other big churches have faltered, it will be content that it still operates as a place of worship.

Let us start at the beginning.

The year is 1818 and to celebrate the recent end of the Napoleonic Wars, parliament passed the Act for Building New Churches, allocating £1 million for the task; the buildings that resulted were often known as the Waterloo churches.

The church was in crisis, a situation brought about by changing demographics and altering religious affiliations: the surge of the working-class population in major cities, especially in the north, and the drift to nonconformity.

The Church Building Commission turned to the government Board of Works, and its three advisory architects, John Nash (1752–1835), John Soane (1753–1837), and their junior, Robert Smirke (1780–1867), to set guidelines and advise on practicalities.

It stated that no church should cost more than £20,000, and by the end of the Commission’s term, in 1856, some 600 new churches would stand across the country.

In Sheffield, three churches were commissioned under the chairmanship of Rev. Thomas Sutton of Sheffield’s Church Building Committee– these were St. George’s, Portobello, St. Philip’s, Netherthorpe, and St. Mary’s at Highfield.

St Mary’s Church was the last of the three to be built and was constructed on land that had been gifted by Henry Charles Howard, the 13^th Duke of Norfolk (also the Earl of Surrey). The foundation stone was laid by his wife, Lady Charlotte, Countess of Surrey, using an engraved silver trowel, in front of a huge crowd.

“With this trowel, Charlotte, Countess of Surrey, laid the foundation stone of St. Mary’s Church, Sheffield, 12 October 1826.”

The foundation stone contained a bottle in which were deposited coins and documents, but a few weeks later, a letter to the Sheffield Independent revealed that the stone had been removed the same night, and the bottle conveyed to the vicar’s house so that it would not be stolen.

The country was amid depression due to suspended credit and impoverished markets and the cutlery industry had suffered badly. For this reason, workmen employed on clearing the site and preparing the foundations were ‘able-bodied and willing minded cutlers’ who had fallen on hard times.

*Original sketch by J. Potter and J. Rogers. Image: Picture Sheffield*

The church was designed by Joseph Potter (1756-1842), a Lichfield-based architect, who early in his career had been employed by James Wyatt to supervise works at Lichfield Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, St Michael’s Church in Coventry (now St Michael’s Cathedral) and the rebuilding of Plas Newydd, a house belonging to the 1^st Marquess of Anglesey. He was the County Surveyor of Staffordshire for 45 years, as well as an engineer for the Grand Trunk Canal Company.

Potter’s eldest son, Robert (1795-1854), supervised the works at St. Mary’s, and he developed an attachment to the town because he opened an architectural practise here and built his home on Queens Road.

Building work was undertaken by Thomas Henry Webster of Stafford and the last stone was laid on top of the pinnacle at the southwest corner of the 140ft tower in November 1828, the occasion marked by the rising of the Standard of England and two other flags.

The church needed a minister and Rev. Sutton, Vicar of the Parish, appointed the Rev Henry Farish, Tutor of Queen’s College, Cambridge, at St. Mary’s in July 1829.

*St. Mary’s Church. Clough Place in background. Image: Picture Sheffield*

The church accommodated 2,000 people and had cost £13,927, the Church Building Commission covering the cost, as well as contributing £40 towards the cost of a bell in its tower. It was consecrated by the Archbishop of York on 21 July 1830.

However, its four-year construction had not been without its problems, but it took a letter to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in October 1926, to reveal what had happened.

“By the original plan, the interior of the church was formed by two fine stone arcades into a handsome nave, with clerestory, and two side aisles, each vaulted, groined, and corbelled in stone. And the powerful buttresses, now on each side of the church, were built to take the weight and thrust of the internal vaulting. When the outside walls had scarcely reached the height of the parapet, an order came from headquarters to stop proceedings. It is supposed the million fund was about exhausted, but particulars were kept dark.

“This calamity completely stultified matters and new arrangements were made to finish the church with the least possible outlay. The result was the present lath and plaster imitation vaulting, supported by long thin cast iron props in lieu of stone pillars. This, I believe was the first and only instance of the use of cast-iron for such a purpose; its use here was owing to cheapness, and although these arrangements were a clever way out of a difficulty, they were always stigmatised by Robert Potter himself as an abortion and architectural curiosity, with which he disliked being associated.”

This revelation is backed by an old document that states that the plumbing, glazing, and imitation of stone on the walls and vaulted roof was by Robert Drury of Howard Street.

St. Mary’s Church had been in semi-rural surroundings. Its construction coincided with the growth of Sheffield, and once the old bridge over the nearby Porter Brook was replaced, the town expanded towards Little Sheffield, a hamlet that once stood in the London Road area that was swallowed up.

A lot has changed since then.

The west part of St. Mary’s was damaged by wartime bombing and was redeveloped by Stephen Welsh into a community centre in 1950. The division of the church was softened by APEC Architects in 1999-2000, who removed the 1950 work and created a new community centre of two floors and a mezzanine that filled all but the chancel and the two east bays of the nave, which is still used for worship.

At the beginning of World War Two, a decision was made to remove the stained glass windows and safely store them. Unfortunately, their location was lost until 2020 when Colin Mantripp, a wood carver from Buckinghamshire, bought what he thought was a box of fragments of stained glass at auction.

When he collected the box, it turned out to be an 8 foot by 3 foot wooden box full of 13 stained glass panels. The outside of the box had St. Mary’s scrawled on the side. After careful research, he discovered that the windows had come from St. Mary’s Church and offered to gift them back providing they could be put back where they belong. The church declined because it wouldn’t have been practical to put them back. The panels are probably from the east window, which was filled with a new commission by Helen Whitaker in 2008.

*One of the missing 13 stained glass panels from St Mary’s Church bought by Colin Mantripp at auction in Buckinghamshire. Image: Sheffield Star*

Finally, as already mentioned by a previous correspondent, let us remember Lily Hawthorne, who was a cleaner at St. Mary’s Church and was murdered here on December 4, 1968. There is plenty of speculation surrounding this tragic incident, but the facts are that Hugh Mason was tried at the Sheffield Assizes in January 1969 on a charge of murder and, after hearing the evidence of three doctors that he was suffering from mental illness, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was admitted to Broadmoor Hospital and later transferred to Sheffield’s Middlewood Hospital in 1972.

*Former interior of St. Mary’s Church. Image: Picture Sheffield*

*St Matthew’s Church, Carver Street. Image/DJP/2022*

It was an exceptionally cold evening, and the light was starting to wane, but this building stood out, magnificent against the clear sky, and all the time, a gentle warmth emanated from within its walls.

“I’ve never noticed it before,” said someone who has lived in Sheffield all his life. “When you think about churches in the city centre, you think about Sheffield Cathedral and St Marie’s. I would be hard-pressed to name others.”

I understood what he meant, but there are several churches besides, including this one, for which we will start at the beginning.

There was once a piece of land extending from Carver Street to Backfields and separated from Division Street by a row of shops known as Division Street market. Houses stood upon this land – some of them notorious dens of vice – but by 1855, these had been cleared and a church built in its place.

In the early years of this century, Carver Street surrendered to change, with most of its historical buildings on its upper section with West Street converted into bars. Nowadays we refer to it as Sheffield’s ‘Party Street.’

Further down the road, where thieves, prostitutes and urchins once scrabbled an existence, life is quieter and simpler, and St Matthew’s Church is still with us.

Late at night, each weekend, Street Pastors congregate here before going out to care for those youngsters who have succumbed to the ‘demon drink.’

The Parish of St Matthew’s was created in 1848 when the original Sheffield parish (now the Anglican Cathedral) was subdivided. Its first Vicar, J.F. Witty, held early services at the National School on Carver Street (now Viper Rooms), but sufficient funds were raised to build a permanent church.

“Since I came to this district, at the invitation of my friend, Rev. T. Sale, Vicar of Sheffield, I have always looked upon it as a missionary appointment – as one calling for more arduous labours than any regular organised district or parish. When I see that there is a population large enough to fully occupy the time of three ministers – that the population is suffering from negligence of years past, and from deep-rooted prejudice and gross ignorance, the alienation of the intellect as well as moral pollution, I see that there is great labour ahead of me.”

The foundation stone was laid in 1854 by H.M. Greaves, of Banner Cross, who was presented with a silver trowel which had on one side a view of the proposed church, and on the other an inscription.

The church was designed by Flockton and Son and was consecrated on 6 June 1855 by the Archbishop of York, Thomas Musgrave.

It cost £3,297 to build, the main benefactor being snuff-maker Henry Wilson of Westbrook Mill who contributed £1,020. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners granted £200 and the Incorporated Church Building Society gave £250. The rest of the money had to be raised by Witty and his congregation.

St Matthew’s was described as in the perpendicular gothic style of architecture, consisting of a nave, chancel, and aisles, with a small gallery in the tower at the west end.

It abutted adjoining buildings which meant that it had to be lit solely from windows in the clerestory and those at the west end where an octagonal tower was built – the first in Sheffield – surmounted by a spire of 65 feet, making a total height to the top of the spire 121 ft.

*St Matthew’s Church, Carver Street.* *Image/The Church of England*

*The West End showing the Goetz & Gwyn Organ installed in 1993. Image/The Church of England*

St Matthew’s survived German bombs in World War Two, but many nearby houses were not so fortunate, and those that remained were later demolished. Without a residential congregation, its fortunes dwindled, surviving a fire in 1956 and the threat of demolition to make way for a new road in the 1970s.

Its circumstances have improved with houses and flats returning within parish boundaries, and there have been several restorations since it was built.

“I often think about those who built these old buildings,” said my colleague. “I wonder what they would think to see that their work is still here all these years later.”

I too, think about those people, long dead and forgotten, and it always provides pleasure to seek out those responsible, each with a story to tell.

Mason’s work, James Powell; carpenter’s work, John Dutton and William Heald; plumbers, John Johnstone; slating, Roger Brown; plastering Thomas S. Harrison.