Our Lady of Lourdes, Benllech

Introduction

Our Lady of Lourdes in Benllech, in the Diocese of Wrexham, was built in 1964-5 by Stewart Powell Bowen with Bill Davies as leading architect.

History

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 the church. Construction of the church started in 1964 and was complete the following year at a cost of £15,500. The church at Benllech set precedents for future work and established the vernacular modernist style later used at two other Catholic churches in N Wales and a Presbyterian chapel.

Architecture and furnishings

The church is in a simple modernist vernacular style, comprising a series of flat-roofed blocks with a steep mono-pitch over the sanctuary and a smaller angular mono-pitched lantern over the baptistery. The interior combines low pine tongue-and-groove boarded ceilings with a double-height space top-lighting the sanctuary. The altar is of massive slabs of Penrhyn slate, with a brass cylindrical tabernacle on the rear wall and a slate above carrying a timber and metal crucifix. The church has painted ceramic Stations of the Cross.

The church occupies a sloping site on the south side of Beach Road. The design provides a flexible space adaptable to seasonal changes in congregation size. The original communion rails have been removed and some fittings replaced, but otherwise the church survives little altered. The main body is almost square in plan with a slightly narrower sanctuary.

The west entrance sits in a porch between the square advanced baptistery block and the long sacristy range running east-west. Walls are white painted roughcast render on a plinth of grey engineering bricks, except the sanctuary, which has a plinth of coursed rubble granite. The church has timber windows with slate sills, timber glazed doors, flat felt-covered roofs, and monopitch roofs of slate and copper. A simple, thin painted steel cross is on the liturgical west wall.

The narthex forms a standing area above the main worship space, lit by five deep-set skylights, with a pine balustrade added later. Steps and an added ramp lead down to the worship area, where the liturgical north wall angles towards the sanctuary under a low ceiling. The double-height sanctuary is raised one step and the altar three further steps, all top lit from the clerestory window in the liturgical east face of the monopitched roof and two high-set windows below. Quarry tiled floors run throughout, with some areas carpeted.