Overstrand Nonconformist Chapel

Description

The Methodist Chapel a Grade II Listed Building was built in 1898 on land given by Lord and Lady Battersea. It is a highly unusual building designed by Edwin Lutyens, and it is suggested by Pevsner that the design is reminiscent of Lutyens’s later work in the crypt of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral. “The main doorway at the eastern end is awesome in its gravitas on such a small building. But the most curious feature is the set of buttresses which run from beneath the clerestory and support it out on the outer walls – as Pevsner says, it is an aggressive functionality”.

It seems extraordinary now that this building was designed and built in the 19th Century, and with hindsight we can see that this was one of East Anglia’s first tastes of the Modernism which was an inevitable descendant of Pugin’s 1840s emphasis on the functionality of architecture, and which would be, by the 1930s, in the ascendant everywhere in the world. (Overstrand Parish Council, n.d.)

Chapel. 1898 by Edwin Lutyens. Brick, tile, pebbledash. Hipped pantile roof. Rectangular in plan. Entrance doorway to the east in splayed recess beneath 6 orders of semicircular brick arches, dying out into the jambs; radiating bands of tiles in the arch continue as vertical bands across the east face and one continuing to form the keystone. Moulded brick shafts to upper corners. Hipped roof from which rises a clerestorey with one Diocletian window to the east. Brick side walls with no windows; pitched roofs from which brick piers rise to support lead-covered beams. 4 Diocletian windows to the clerestorey on both north and south. Interior. Semicircular headed cupboards with keystones to either side of entrance. Late C19 fittings. (Historic England, list entry 1170798)

Bibliography

Historic England.METHODIST CHAPEL. [Online] Available from: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1170798

Also Cited In

Listing Grade

II

Listing Reference

1170798

Client