St Mary's Church | |
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St Mary's Church, Wreay | |
54°49′55″N2°52′50″W / 54.83199°N 2.88066°W | |
Location | Wreay |
Country | United Kingdom |
Denomination | Church of England |
Website | St Mary's Church |
History | |
Consecrated | 1 December 1842 [1] |
Architecture | |
Heritage designation | Grade II* |
Designated | 1 April 1957 |
Architect(s) | Sara Losh |
Style | Lombard revival |
Completed | 1842 |
Construction cost | £1,200 |
Administration | |
Province | Province of York |
Diocese | Diocese of Carlisle |
St Mary's Church, Wreay is the Church of England parish church of Wreay in Cumbria. It was designed by Sara Losh in about 1835 and built between 1840 and 1842. It is notable as the earliest known example in Britain of a revival of Lombard architecture. It is a Grade II* listed building. [2]
Prominent in the churchyard are a mausoleum of Sara Losh's sister, Katharine, and a copy of the Bewcastle Cross. [3] [4]
St Mary's replaces an earlier parish church in Wreay. Losh funded the new church on condition that she was allowed to choose the design. She intended her design to follow the style of Roman basilicas of the early Church. But its style is in fact Lombard, which was a 7th-and 8th-century successor to early Christian architecture [5] and predecessor of Romanesque. Lombard is an Italian style, but the church also includes French features. [5]
In the 1830s the architectural fashion for new churches was shifting from Neoclassical to Gothic Revival, but Losh chose neither. By the 1830s Britain had a very small number of buildings designed in a revival of Norman architecture, which is a form of northern European Romanesque, but these do not seem to have been a direct influence on Losh either.
Losh seems to have been inspired by architects in Berlin and Munich who had begun to revive Lombard architecture in the 1820s. [6] [5] She designed her church at the same time as Romanesque Revival architecture in the United Kingdom was pioneered by the architects TH Wyatt with the parish church at Wilton, Wiltshire and John Shaw Jr. with Christ Church, Watney Street in the East End of London, but she seems to have developed her ideas independently. [6]
Losh and her sister Katherine had been on the Grand Tour. Neither was married. Katherine died in 1835 and Sara dedicated the church to her. In the churchyard is a mausoleum in which is a life-size marble statue of Katherine Losh that was sculpted by David Dunbar based on a sketch supplied by Sara. [7] Dunbar worked locally. [8]
Losh innovated liturgically as well as architecturally. She designed the chancel with a freestanding altar, allowing the priest to face his congregation as he presided at the Eucharist. [6] In doing so she followed early Christian practice, and broke with the Anglican tradition of standing either at the north end of the altar or, in the High church Anglican tradition, facing east with one's back to the congregation. The practice became common in Anglican churches after the 1960s but was a radical departure in the 1840s.
The church has a rectangular nave and a semicircular apsidal chancel. Dante Gabriel Rossetti admired Losh's works in Wreay and described St Mary's church as "extraordinary architectural works" with "a church of a byzantine style and other things ... full of beauty and imaginative detail, though extremely severe and simple" and "much more original than the things done by the young architects now." [9]
Losh decorated the church with many carved details both inside and out. Many are of plants or animals: birds, insects, flowers, foliage, corn ears, [10] and a recurring motif of pine cones. A young local stonemason, William Hindson, carved the sculptures. [10] A plaque in the church commemorates him. [11]
The style of the sculptures prefigures that of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s and 1900s, which coincided with a small-scale revival of Byzantine Revival architecture. [10] In the architecture and decorative arts of the early 1840s, St Mary's church at Wreay is pioneering and seems to be unique.
Romanesque Revival is a style of building employed beginning in the mid-19th century inspired by the 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque architecture. Unlike the historic Romanesque style, Romanesque Revival buildings tended to feature more simplified arches and windows than their historic counterparts.
The Bewcastle Cross is an Anglo-Saxon cross which is still in its original position within the churchyard of St Cuthbert's church at Bewcastle, in the English county of Cumbria. The cross, which probably dates from the 7th or early 8th century, features reliefs and inscriptions in the runic alphabet. The head of the cross is missing but the remains are 14.5 feet high, and almost square in section 22 by 21+1⁄4 inches at the base. The crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell have been described by the scholar Nikolaus Pevsner as "the greatest achievement of their date in the whole of Europe".
Bewcastle is a large civil parish in the Cumberland unitary authority area of Cumbria, England. It is in the historic county of Cumberland.
Wreay is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of St Cuthbert Without, in the Cumberland district, in the ceremonial county of Cumbria, England. It lies on the River Petteril, the M6 motorway, A6 trunk road and West Coast Main Line railway all skirt the village. In 1931 it had a population of 131.
The year 1842 in architecture involved some significant events.
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St Mary's Church is an Anglican church at the end of a lane to the south of the village of Nether Alderley, Cheshire, England. It dates from the 14th century, with later additions and a major restoration in the late-19th century. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building.
James Losh (1763–1833) was an English lawyer, reformer and Unitarian in Newcastle upon Tyne. In politics, he was a significant contact in the North East for the national Whig leadership. William Wordsworth the poet called Losh in a letter of 1821 "my candid and enlightened friend".
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St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church, Mortlake, is a Roman Catholic church in North Worple Way, Mortlake, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. The church is dedicated to Jesus' companion Mary Magdalene. It is located just south of Mortlake High Street and the Anglican St Mary the Virgin Church. St Mary Magdalen's Catholic Primary School is just north of the churchyard.
Sara or Sarah Losh was an English architect and designer. Her biographer describes her as an antiquarian, architect and visionary. She was a landowner of Wreay, Cumberland, where her prime work, St Mary's Church, can be found. It anticipates the Arts and Crafts Movement and belongs to a group with buildings and monuments which Losh constructed.
Edwin Hugh Shellard was an English architect who practised in Manchester, being active between 1844 and 1864. Most of his works are located in Northwest England, in what is now Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire. He was mainly an ecclesiastical architect, and gained contracts to design at least 13 churches for the Church Building Commission, these churches being known as Commissioners' churches. Most of his designs were in Gothic Revival style, usually Early English or Decorated, but he also experimented in the Perpendicular style. He employed the Romanesque Revival style in his additions to St Mary's Church, Preston. The National Heritage List for England shows that at least 23 of his new churches are designated as listed buildings, four of them at Grade II*. The authors of the Buildings of England series consider that his finest work is St John's Minster in Preston, Lancashire.
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Michael Drury was an English architect working in Lincoln.
Romanesque Revival, Norman Revival or Neo-Norman styles of building in the United Kingdom were inspired by the Romanesque architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries AD.
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Media related to St Mary's, Wreay at Wikimedia Commons