St Augustine's Parish Church

Cadw's description

Location

In walled churchyard on highest part of Penarth Head; entrance close to junction with St Augustine's Place.

History

1865-66. By William Butterfield, architect, of London. For Baroness Windsor replacing ancient church outgrown by population of town. Builders Webb and Co of Birmingham. Cost £10,000.

Exterior

Victorian Gothic church in spare Early English style with distinctive saddleback tower. Chancel with S transept organ chamber and N vestry over boiler room; aisled nave with SW saddleback tower and NW porch. Leckwith limestone facings, bathstone dressings and bands, red Staffordshire tiles, some Radyr stone shafts.
Parapet gables with carved crucifix finials and moulded kneelers. Stepped sill band with quatrefoil panels under three-light Geometric East window. Low set back buttresses with steep set-offs. Grouped lancets with small oculus to organ chamber. Paired lancets (single towards W) in shallow clerestorey panels with banding as E wall; grouped aisle lights divided by buttresses with sill band as before. Weathercock finial to W gable of four-storey tower with corbelled saddle, twin re-used lancets to bell openings, triple arcades to lower storey, corner buttresses.
Simple pointed archway of two orders (chamfered and cavetto) with hoodmould and impost stringcourse; double boarded doors with fine foliage hinges and fretted ironwork band incorporating door handle. Four-light plate tracery W window with twin panels below sill band. Remarkable quatrefoil to N aisle end overlapped by cross gable NW porch with shafted outer archway reached up steps. Tall NE vestry with fine twin round stacks, 'ragged ' gable crucifix over unusual three-light plate tracery window and offset doorways (up and down steps) under catslide roof. Typical shouldered lights in E wall. Oval churchyard with good C19 monuments including that of Dr Joseph Parry, a pillar of white marble surmounted by lyre; roughly coursed rubble boundary wall with (inset at SW corner) scallop-shell cast iron drinking fountain.

Interior

Polychrome brick patterns and bathstone dressings on red brick facings. Stilted low-pitch chancel roof with stellar pattern ribs and crenellated wall plate; steeper nave roof similar with wall posts to main trusses. Low cusped and cavetto arched recesses of banded stone to sanctuary with spandrel quatrefoils below stringcourse stepping up to form hoodmoulds over banded arched openings to N and S. Gothic screen to N side and S organ (installed 1898) by William Hill. Decorative brass altar rails, chequered marble reredos, patterned tiled floor, Georgian tablets in rector's vestry with Gothic fireplace and piscina.
Banded and chamfered chancel arch on semi-octagonal responds. Medieval carved stone churchyard cross (modern base) to SW side (brought from churchyard; Scheduled Ancient Monument; Cadw Ref Gm 227). Two-storey nave elevation with deeply splayed clerestorey lancets, marble shafts and trefoil roundels to spandrels of paired lights; stringcourse of saw-tooth brickwork steps down towards E end. Fully diapered arcades of chamfered arches supported by alternating octagonal and cylindrical piers. Foiled sunk roundels with lettered inscriptions to spandrels. West wall diapered on upper part as clerestorey; war memorial below window. Traceried octagonal timber pulpit; octagonal font with marble shafts; stained glass probably by E W Gibbs to Butterfield's bold designs.

Reason for designation

Graded I as this important architect's most ambitious building in Wales, an unspoilt textbook example of high Victorian church architecture.