The Story and Richness of the Building

One of the riches of Cardiff is its 19^th century churches, which display a fascinating architecture; the building in Windsor Place, which today is the home of the City United Reformed Church, is one such building. It was founded by a group of Scottish Presbyterians, who had been drawn to Cardiff in the early 19^th century by the great Scots land owner and industrialist the 2^nd Marquis of Bute.

As people from Scotland helped to start Cardiff upon the road to being the world’s major coal-exporting port, they brought with them their religion. Until the mid-1860’s the Scots worshiped with members of the then Charles Street Congregational Church. In 1864 there were enough of them to form a separate church and this they were encouraged to do by members of Charles Street. From September 1864 they met in an upstairs room in the Cardiff Arms Hotel and the landlord of that establishment made a gift of £1 to start the building fund for their church. Within three months £1000 had been raised, and in 1865 a site was acquired from the land owned by Viscount Tredegar.

From eight sets of plans submitted in May that year, the Elders chose the design of Mr Frederick Thomas Pilkinton, an architect with no other work in Wales and little in the West of England. In September, a contract was signed with Messrs. James & Price for £3246 and on February 15^th, 1866 the foundation stone was laid. Matters moved fast from that point – on April 9^th, a Mr Fordyce was called to be minister a summer bazaar in the Town Hall raised £340, the minister was inducted on August 1^st and on Friday October 9^th the building was opened. In the brief time between the opening and the first Sunday Service, Viscount Tredegar opened a new fund which raised £452 16 shillings. It had taken two years and two months to raise £4520 for the building and less than a year to erect it.

Windsor Place, Dumfries Place and the streets around Senghenydd Road were all laid out together on land belonging to Viscount Tredegar and was known as Tredegarville. The houses in Windsor Place are fine examples of domestic order and splendour; formal, well-regulated and distant. By contrast, the Church building makes a strong statement and could be considered strident and aggressive. Its style could only be termed “Victorian”, representing a complete break with the classical design that had been popular until the 1830’s and 40’s.

In 1873 a hall was built at the back of the Church, costing £1443 and in 1874 a space was made for an organ by extending the back wall eight feet at the cost of £1000. Then in 1893, the west wall and porch were taken down and moved, the porch being turned at right-angles to disguise the fact that the nave had been lengthened. The architect for this was a Cardiff man, Col. Bruce Vaughan. He tried to mimic Pilkinton by adding red stone above the exterior of the west window, two entrances and a window in the nave. A coarse textured cream stone dressing was also applied to the outside of the building up to the corners of the spire.

A flourishing congregation worshiped in the building until February 20^th 1910, when the building burned to the ground after the evening service. It was completely gutted inside, but the masonry remained intact. Vaughan was called in again, re-designed the buildings in his own style, rather than trying to copy Pilkinton’s work. He was responsible for the hammer-beam roof, with its horizontal beams that jut out about 4 feet from the wall, from which arches spring. Another addition of this was the ‘tester’ or pulpit canopy a spectacular piece of wood carving.

Vaughan was fond of diagonal patterns and installed the large highly decorated pulpit, carved with designs of 13^th century origin. The beasts of the four evangelists are carved in panels each with its own roundel; and strange finials as well as green marble columns complete with effect. At the same time, the fine organ case was installed, and the building converted to electricity, though Vaughan was asked to keep two gas brackets. In all the work cost £9500, almost all of which was paid for by the insurance claim.

Of particular interest after the rebuild, was the installation in 1921 of the War Memorial windows on the south side. Also in the south transepts a memorial to John Gunn which contains glorious carved lettering of the kind later revived by Eric Gill. Both Oliver Lodge, the architect, and T.J. Whittaker, the sculptor, signed the work which indicates their pride in it.

In 1980-81, the church was restored by Wyn Thomas & Partners. The old north porch is now enshrined in the new entrance to the building and the finial which originally topped its gable is on the staircase landing.

In 1992 further work was carried out to make room for an SPCK bookshop with access from the main South Porch. At this time opportunity was taken to remove the gallery and replace it by a new ‘upper room’. The original fascia to the gallery was retained to provide a new front to the upstairs development; a lift was installed by the entrance to the bookshop to enable the upstairs accommodation to be accessible for the disabled. Below, a new vestibule has been created at the rear of the church. These alterations make it possible for the great West Window and small coloured windows to be clearly visible in the upper room. The architect for this work was John Partridge of Chris Lodge Partnership.

Today the building is hidden amongst offices, shops and banks – a hidden gem of the City of Cardiff. Many who enter the building are astonished to see a building of such beauty and splendour.

In rejecting classical architecture as heathen, because it was based on Greek and Roman lines, the Gothic revival encouraged irregularity in design instead. Architects could now place small features next to large ones in their buildings; they could change scale and texture in their work and vary things by putting stone colours and patterns next to one another. Frederick Pilkinton, the architect of Windsor Place, was an architect in this style, though not one of the most famous. He does not appear in the dictionary of the 19^th century biography, nor is there much of his work in architectural journals. It seems likely he was a native of Lincolnshire, the son of an architect and an ardent Methodist. He joined the family practice in Edinburgh in 1859 and from 1863 to 1877 formed a partnership with John Murray Bell. His most impressive work was produced between 1861 and 1881. Much of his work was done in Scotland; he designed several Scots churches in the four years before the Windsor Place contract, including what was probably his most famous church ‘The Barclay Memorial Church in Edinburgh’.

Viewed from the outside, the church in Windsor Place has a bizarre, fantastic quality, with many spiky outlines, abrupt transitions, varying roof levels and slightly sloping walls. The original roof shape would have looked very much like insect wings, folded, creating many strange shaped gables. Yet for that, the building hangs together well, making it a very personal achievement. Inside, the straightforward cross-like plan can be seen clearly, but from the outside it seems to end blurred and confused by the different roofs at varying pitches; the porches and the spire which seem to end and start again.

Another technique Pilkinton used is that of ‘dualities’, putting two identical things next to one another so that the eye does not settle. An example of this is the two windows in the north transept. The west window, also, has four lights and masonry running down the middle, rather than the glass as might have been expected. These and other little contradictions to be found outside the building are there to make people look harder at the architecture.

Originally, the building was much shorter than today’s structure, ending in a wall where the wall now stands at the rear of the vestibule, behind the present glazed screen. The building, which was almost square, was set back from the street and could be walked around on all sides. It would have held a very large number of people and have been very dark. Galleries ran across one transept, across the nave where the pillars are now, and across the other transept so creating a sort of amphitheatre. To this theatre of non-conformist drama, heavy with timber and intricate woodwork, came the great preachers of the day. Though the outside of the building was set out to attract attention, the interior was simple and understated. Inside, Pilkinton abandoned church-like features, avoiding any arches apart from those over windows.

From outside, the curved ends of the interior transept are only hinted at. The visitor to the original building would have gone through the central gates in the boundary wall onto Windsor Place and enter by the north or south porch. Both gave access to the stairs and encouragement from the architecture to use the galleries that added so much to the seating capacity of the building.

A keystone design and carving of the thistles on the west frontage shows today where the original church entrance was. This aspect of the building was Pilkinton’s architectural triumph, though it is too close to be road today to be fully appreciated. At the bottom are four ached openings which are now filled in but were once glazed or open. Above these three open circular windows are topped by a bigger window with four lights, and at the point of the pyramid is one, larger circular window. The frontage is decorated with wonderful reliefs of wild flowers and plants, a riot of sculpture and the effect topped off by red stones.

The intention of the west front was to pull the eye upwards to the spire, an extraordinary construction that gives an immense impression of strength though not being very tall. Buttresses slope up steeply from ground level around the spire, to be stopped by a thick carved band. Above this, corner buttresses rise more steeply before disappearing into the wall, to be overtaken by enormous dormer windows of great height, topped with more red stone. There are niches for sculpture on the spire, in the form of spears projecting from the wall, but these were probably never used. This spire sums up the basic, elemental quality of the whole building and makes a strong statement with its tough aggressive appearance.