Building record 1180300000 - The Radcliffe Centre

Grade II. Nonconformist church and Sunday school, now lecture hall, classrooms and dwellings. Built 1857. By Foster and Wood of Bristol. Enlarged 1876-9 with addition of classroom range, converted 1982. Squared Cosgrove limestone rubble with Bath stone dressings and slate roofs. PLAN: rectangular, part-aisled church with porch to front, flanked by stair turrets and attached classroom range of irregular plan to right side. EXTERIOR: Early English style. Central tall gabled porch with double-leaf doors, many-moulded doorway with 1 order of shafts and hoodmould with labels, triple niche above with colonnettes and datestone to head of gable, which is stone-coped with kneelers; 4-light windows either side with cusped heads on colonnettes and off-set gabled buttresses either side of front. Principal chapel window above and partly behind porch gable consisting of group of 3 lancets with 2 orders of shafts and Geometrical tracery to heads. Taller central lancet is wider and has 3 trefoils to head above cusping, those either side having 1 trefoil to head above trefoil-headed lights; hoodmould with label stops. Blank arcading below window, offset gabled buttresses either side, small chamfered trefoil windows flanking head of central lancet and trefoil window to gable head with double-chamfered surround. Stone-coped gable with kneelers to steeply pitched roof. Front is flanked by 2-storey stair turrets giving access to gallery and 1st floor of classroom range. That to left has double roll-moulded doorway, that to right has double-chamfered doorway both with hoodmoulds, and polygonal upper storeys with 1-light windows and corbel tables to steeply pitched roofs. 1 and 2-storied classroom range has picturesque composition stepping down St Rumbold's Lane to right with canted stone bay surmounted by dormer behind stair turret, gabled porch, stone lateral stack, large stone mullion and transom windows with cusped heads to lights and terminal cross wing at lowest level. INTERIOR: hammer-beam roof. Deep gallery at entrance end, 4-bay arcade to aisle on left side, 2-bay arcade to short aisle on right side, both with circular piers on octagonal bases with moulded capitals. Organ of 1799 with mahogany case in Gothick style. Wall monument of white marble on slate ground to Rev Enoch Barling minister 1818-32 with acanthus brackets to tablet which is topped by urn with flame finial; removed from 'The Old Meeting House' after the union of the two congregations in 1850. Wall monument of white marble on slate ground to Stephen Webb, Deacon, who died in 1852 with extract from funeral sermon to inscription. Formerly a Congregational church. Converted by the University of Buckingham and reopened 1982 (B1).
Buildings report dated September 1980 held at NMR (B2).