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Christ Church

Mount Pleasant, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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During the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, between 1790 and 1815, little Anglican church building had been carried out despite the population growing and competition from nonconformist chapels. So, by an Act of Parliament in 1818, the government put up £1 million (and another £500,000 later) towards the building of new churches and enlarging others. Bradford on Avon’s large parish was a candidate for new church, which resulted in the building of Christ Church in a prominent position at the top of the hill on the northern side of the town.

Christ Church is mostly the work of the Bath City Architect  George Phillips Manners (1789-1866), who designed St Michael’s church, Bath and restored the Abbey. Also in Bradford, he probably designed the adjacent Christ Church National School in 1847, while his partner John Elkington Gill was responsible for restoration work on Holy Trinity parish church. The first stone of Christ Church was laid on 12 September 1839 and it was constructed by local builder Charles Jones in two years and was consecrated on 17th November 1841. It cost £3,862.14s.1d., of which a contribution would have come from the Incorporated Church Building Society and the rest raised locally. Manners designed it in a perpendicular gothic style, with a tower and spire braced by flying buttresses  that might be at home in Northamptonshire or Lincolnshire.

As an Anglican church of the time, in which preaching was more important than ritual, the body of the church was a rectangular aisleless hall, with little in the way of a chancel. This was not universally approved of even then and by 1870 the fashion had changed and more emphasis was placed on the high altar.

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In 1876 Sir George Gilbert Scott was called upon to make alterations to cater for High Victorian taste, by extending the east end to provide a proper chancel and space for choir stalls and organ, at a cost of £2,000. Further work was done by his son, John Oldridd Scott, during the 1880s, including the south porch with window above it, adding the oak chancel screen and northern transept to house the organ, removing a gallery on the west wall of the nave where the organ had originally been and reseating for 450. The photograph dates from early in the 20th century, with many of the changes in place.

A south chapel, in the form of a stubby transept, was added in 1919 by the Diocesan architect Charles Edwin Ponting (1850-1932), architect of the rebuilt Holt parish church, as a memorial to Lt. Charles Eric Moulton, son of John Moulton of The Hall, who had died in the Great War.