St Ethelbert – Leominster

Introduction

St Ethelbert in Leominster, within the Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia, was designed by Peter Paul Pugin and opened in 1888. The church is oriented north-south instead of east-west, with north as the ritual eastern end.

History

In 1877 a priest was appointed to the town. Father Athanasius Rogers started a tenure in 1884 which lasted until 1915. Money for the new church was provided by Mrs. Louise Herbert, the widow of a solicitor in the town. The chosen site was one in a row along Bargates, which was being developed as a street of large villas on the western outskirts of Leominster. Following the Second Vatican Council of 1962-4, the church was slightly re-ordered, and the former altar rails were removed and are now lost.

Architecture and furnishings

The building is of coursed rubble with ashlar dressings and a plain tiled and slate roof. The sandstone of the plinth is local from Eyton, but above that level it was brought from Godsall, Staffordshire. The style is Gothic, transitional between Decorated and Perpendicular. The reredos, of red Runcorn sandstone, has a central canopied niche for a monstrance flanked by a blind arcade and two further canopied niches containing wooden figures of the Virgin and Child and St Joseph.

The church has a canopied niche containing the effigy of Saint Ethelbert added in 1908 and sculpted by William Storr-Barber. The porch at the south-east angle is glazed on three sides, with chamfered timber posts and panels of diamond-pattern leaded glazing with cusped heads and yellow glass quarries to the margins. The flooring throughout the church is parquet, and there are wooden benches of two different patterns, which early photographs show to have been a later insertion. The entrance porch has patterned encaustic tiling to the floor and a bench on the north side.