14674

 

II  

Designated  

25/07/1994  

25/07/1994  

Methodist Church of St John, with attached Hall and Former Sunday School  

 

Conwy  

Colwyn Bay  

 

Colwyn Bay  

284622  

379118  

S  

 

Religious, Ritual and Funerary  

 

The church was partly funded from the 'watering places fund' established to enable church building in the new resorts. The foundation stone was laid 1882, and the building itself erected 1887-8; Robert Curwen of London and Liverpool, architect, Edward Foulkes of Colwyn Bay, builder. The adjoining church hall was the original school room, completed in 1983 and extended in 1908.  

Random polygonal granite with freestone dressings, slate roof with red tiled cresting. Nave with narrow lean-to aisles and clerestory, aspidal sanctuary. Tower with brooch spire offset to NW, and hall and sunday school to SW. 5-light N window with geometrical tracery incorporating a star. 3-stage tower with clasping buttresses. Doorway to W in deep moulded arch with flat splayed responds, 2-light window above, then tall narrow lancets and frieze; brooch spire. Buttressed and gabled porch to NE with banded clustered shafts and quarterfoil moulding to arch, with ogee hood mould. Paired broad foiled and cusped lancets between the buttresses of aisles, with continuous hood moulds and string courses. 2-light reticulated clerestory windows with plain impost and sill bands. Paired 2-light reticulated windows in E transept, with rose window in gable apex. Apsidal sanctuary with decorated window in each face. W transept connects the church with the hall: as the original school room, this was completed before the church in 1983, and was used for services untill the completion of the church itself; it has canted N end, with a gable in each face, each with a 3-light flat headed perpendicular window with transom. Projecting gabled bay to W, with canted porch in the angle surmounted by a louvered bell turret with scalloped slate spirelet. 3 foiled lancet windows in W gable. Flat roof block adjoining to the S, and the cross-gabled hall range beyond it were added as the sunday school in 1908; similar detail, with stepped lancet windows in gable, and square headed perpendicular windows elsewhere.  

Nave arcade of 4 bays, though the western bay is blind walled and aisle-less. Cylindrical shafts on high bases with moulded arches. Similar arches form the 4 sides of the crossing. Corbelled stone engaged shafts carry the timber wall posts of the principal trusses: braced queen post roof with slender crown posts. Boarded roof. Very narrow passage aisles. Apsidal sanctuary, with boarded and ribbed vaulted roof, the vaulting sprung from wall shafts forming continuous arcading with windows in alternative faces. Pulpit under sanctuary arch towards the W: panelled wood on heavy moulded stone base wood traceried communion rails; altar and reredos designed as a piece: both pale oak, the reredos with free-standing, gabletted arcading, with fleurons to gables, and crocketted pinnacles. Organ in W transept, in richly worked case with traceried panels, crocketted pinnacles etc. 2 bay arcade filled by panelled and partly glazed screen seperates the church from the adjoining hall. Stained Glass: unusual design in N window, with a pattern of blossoming branches and a small portrait roundel of the dedicatee. Dated 1885. E transept window dated 1932; Sanctuary and W transept windows form a series: highly coloured fruit and flower emblems, dated 1888. Other windows all have pale coloured glass with some abstract floral memblems, and may be the original designs.  

Built on a grand scale, the church is a prominent feature in the townscape and a significant testimony to the growth of Colwyn Bay at the end of the C19.