St Paul's Church is situated within the city of

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, situated south of Leeds and east of Manchester. The city is the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire and some of its so ...

South Yorkshire South Yorkshire is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It borders North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire to the north, the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north-east, Lincolnshire ...

, England, in the suburb of Parson Cross on Wordsworth Avenue. St Paul's is a modern looking post war church which has been designated as a Grade II*

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

History

St Paul's was opened in 1959 to serve the New Parson Cross estate which had been constructed on previous

greenfield land Greenfield land is a British English term referring to undeveloped land in an urban or rural area either used for agriculture or landscape design, or left to evolve naturally. These areas of land are usually agricultural or amenity properties ...

in the late 1940s as the City of Sheffield cleared its

slum A slum is a highly populated Urban area, urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are p ...

housing and expanded into the countryside. The church was designed by the

Scottish Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

Basil Spence Sir Basil Urwin Spence, (13 August 1907 – 19 November 1976) was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Moderni ...

who was forced to work with a limited budget. Spence was working on his most famous design

Coventry Cathedral The Cathedral Church of Saint Michael, commonly known as Coventry Cathedral, is the seat of the Bishop of Coventry and the Diocese of Coventry within the Church of England. The cathedral is located in Coventry, West Midlands (county), West Midla ...

at the same time that he was overseeing the construction of St Paul's.''"A History of Sheffield"'',

David Hey David G. Hey (18 July 1938 – 14 February 2016) was an English historian, and was an authority on surnames and the local history of Yorkshire. Hey was the president of the British Association for Local History, and was a published author of sev ...

, , Page 277 Gives some information on post war housing development in Sheffield. When St Paul's was opened in 1959 it did not have its own

parish A parish is a territorial entity in many Christianity, Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest#Christianity, priest, often termed a parish pries ...

and was purely a daughter church to St Mary's, Ecclesfield. However the area around St Paul's was declared a Conventional District within the Ecclesfield parish and in 1973 the separate parish of St Paul, Wordsworth Avenue was created. The new housing estate never had an official name, so the parish is one of the few which is identified by its street address rather than by its district. The parish was badly hit by the collapse of the Sheffield steel industry in the 1980s.

Architecture

Spence's design for St Paul's is quite simple although this is not obvious at first glance. The church is basically two brick walls joined by a shallow

barrel vault A barrel vault, also known as a tunnel vault, wagon vault or wagonhead vault, is an architectural element formed by the extrusion of a single curve (or pair of curves, in the case of a pointed barrel vault) along a given distance. The curves are ...

roof strengthened by diagonal steel bracing. The ends of the church consist almost entirely of

glass Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline solid, non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparency and translucency, transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window pane ...

with Spence integrating some the ideas he had used at St Oswald's, Tile Hill in 1957. To the front of the church is a high

campanile A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or that is designed to hold bells even if it has none. Such a tower commonly serves as part of a Christian church, and will contain church bells, but there are also many secular bell to ...

consisting of just two brick walls with concrete ties in between. There is a cross on top of the campanile. The church hall stands just to the north within the church grounds. The interior has a balcony reached by steps on which the organ stands. While the altar is screened to give it some privacy from the big end window by a hardwood panel made from

African Teak African teak is a common name for several plants and may refer to: *'' Baikiaea plurijuga'', native to the northern Kalahari *'' Milicia excelsa'', also known as iroko, native to Africa from the Ivory Coast to Ethiopia and south to Angola and Moz ...

. Spence's personal gift for the church were the altar ornaments which are made from hammered iron.''"Pevsner Architectural Guides - Sheffield"'', Ruth Harman & John Minnis, , Page 37 Gives details of architecture.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wordsworth Avenue, St Paul Churches in Sheffield Church of England church buildings in South Yorkshire Churches completed in 1959 20th-century Church of England church buildings Grade II* listed buildings in Sheffield Grade II* listed churches in South Yorkshire