St Jude, Worsley Mesnes

Introduction

St Jude's Church in Worsley Mesnes was built in 1964-5 by L A G Prichard & Son with a reinforced concrete frame and pinkish bricks.

History

St Jude's was built in 1964-5 to serve a major housing development in Worsley Mesnes, about 1.5 miles south-west of Wigan town centre. The first Mass was said in the temporary building around November 1959.

A temporary church was initially built by the first parish priest while the architects L A G Prichard & Son designed a permanent building capable of holding 600. The baptistery was turned into a shrine dedicated to St Jude in 1993. In 1996 the area behind the sanctuary which formed a Lady Chapel and vestry for altar servers had a change of use to a meeting room and a weekday chapel. The Sacrament of Marriage can be administered at either church, with an appointment to discuss marriage preparation.

Architecture and furnishings

The church is shaped like an isosceles triangle with squared-off corners, with the broad north base equating to the liturgical east and the altar in its centre. The church has a large reinforced double-height concrete frame with a set-back box-like clerestorey with a flat roof, positioned to light the altar. The circular brick baptistery has a concrete cap set with a horizontal clerestorey band of dalle de verre panels, and four tapering concrete fins rise from its centre to form an open spirelet supporting a pole topped with a cross.

Inside, the expressed concrete frame has projecting uprights supporting angled beams fanning out from the long liturgical east wall to meet uprights set against the lower, angled rear walls. The semi-circular sanctuary area is raised up several steps and retains its original Bianco Carrara marble steps, altar, and altar rails. The ambo, in matching marble, was installed in 2001. The church has a large mosaic Crucifixion depicting Christ on the Cross, with the Blessed Virgin Mary kneeling on the left and St John standing on the right, designed by Hans Unger and created by mosaic artist Eberhard Schulze.

Above the altar is a large mosaic crucifixion 5 m x 2.7 m (17ft x 9 ft) designed by Hans Unger and created by mosaic artist, Eberhard Schulze, their first large-scale religious mural. The windows consist of swirling abstract dalle de verre glass by Robin Riley, with each window made up of nine panels containing an over-arching pattern of shaped pieces of intensely-coloured glass. The church was designed with two sets of six staggered windows with abstract dalle de verre glass by Robin Riley, the glass made by Verriers de St Jobain in France and cut, shaped and fitted by J O'Neill & Sons of Liverpool.

Robin Riley also designed the narrow band of clerestorey windows in the circular baptistery. There is a set of Stations of the Cross from c1967 by Earley & Co of Dublin. The entrance porch contains a tapering concrete holy water stoop.

The church is a concrete structure in the shape of a fan, with 30-foot windows in self-coloured glass and 600 seats providing an uninterrupted view of the High Altar. To the rear of the altar is a projecting retable covered in blue mosaic tiles.

A conventional choir, accompanied by the church organ, sings at the Sunday morning Mass. A symmetrical set of organ pipes stands in the centre of the concrete balcony.