Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes

Cadw's description

Location

On a sloping site on the S side of Beach Road.

History

Catholic Church 1964-5 by Stewart Powell Bowen with Bill Davies as leading architect.

Benllech, like many coastal towns in N Wales in the post-war period, balanced a relatively low resident Catholic population with a seasonal influx of tourists in the holiday seasons. In 1959 Fr J Jackson was appointed as parish priest by Bishop Petit of Menevia and he held a regular Mass in a local dance hall. Fr Jackson set about raising the funds for a permanent church and purchased a plot on Beach Road for £950. Fundraising was carried out to meet the construction costs and in that time a Caernarfon surveyor was contracted to design a church. Plans for a traditional stone-built church were drawn up but not carried out. Instead, Stewart Powell Bowen, working with Bill Davies, was taken on to design a church.

The design produced by Bill Davies was for a striking modern church, breaking away from tradition both in its embrace of the reforming ethos of the Second Vatican Council, and also in its use of a modern vernacular idiom responsive to its landscape context. The building was also designed to provide a flexible space, adaptable for seasonal fluctuations in congregation size. Construction of the church started in 1964 and was complete the following year at a cost of £15,500. It was opened by Bishop Petit on 5 September 1965.

The church at Benllech set precedents for future work and established the vernacular modernist style which was later used at two other Catholic churches in N Wales (Christ the King at Towyn in 1973-4 (qv) and St Illtyd at Rhuddlan in 1975-6 (qv) and then at the Presbyterian chapel of Capel y Groes in Wrexham (1982).

The original communion rails in the church have been removed and some other fittings have been replaced but otherwise the church survives little altered.

Exterior

Church in simple modernist vernacular style. It comprises a series of flat-roofed blocks, with steep mono-pitch rearing up over the sanctuary, and a smaller angular mono-pitched lantern over the baptistery. Main body of church is almost square in plan with slightly narrower sanctuary. Entrance on west side (the liturgical south), in porch between square advanced baptistery block and the long sacristy range, which runs east-west. Walls of white painted roughcast render on plinth of grey engineering bricks, except for the sanctuary which is set on a plinth of coursed rubble granite. Timber windows with slate sills, timber glazed doors. Flat roofs with felt covers, monopitch roofs of slate and copper. Simple, thin painted steel cross on liturgical W wall of church.

Interior

Simple yet dramatic church interior, combining low pine tongue-and-groove boarded ceilings with double-height space top-lighting the sanctuary. Access is from porch leading into small narthex with former baptistry in W corner and sacristy to the E . The narthex forms a standing area above the main worship space (to which it forms almost an aisle), . lit by 5 deep-set skylights – the pine balustrade is a later addition. Steps (and an added ramp) lead down to worship area, with liturgical N wall angled towards the sanctuary, and low ceiling. Double-height sanctuary raised up 1 step and altar raised up 3 further steps, all strikingly top lit from the clerestory window in the liturgical E face of the monopitched roof, and 2 high-set windows in the wall below it. Altar set towards the front of the sanctuary, of massive slabs of Penrhyn slate. Brass cylindrical tabernacle on rear wall with a slate above carrying a timber and metal crucifix, and above this a sculptured fish emblem with Chi-Rho symbol. Painted ceramic Stations of the Cross. Quarry tiled floors throughout, some areas carpeted.

Reason for designation

Included for its special interest as a pioneering example of a post-war Catholic church, displaying the reforming ideas of the Second Vatican Council and breaking away from the conventions of church planning in an assured design using a distinctive vernacular modernism. One of the finest churches by Bill Davies and the Bowen Dann Davies Partnership, who were amongst the most accomplished architects and partnerships working in Wales in the post-war period. The church survives relatively little altered.