Parish Church of St Mary Penzance, England

Text courtesy of Historic England. © Crown Copyright, reprinted under the Open Government License.

866/5/1 CHAPEL STREET 29-JUL-50 PENZANCE (Southwest side) PARISH CHURCH OF ST MARY

II* By Charles Hutchens, 1832-5.

Materials: West Penwith granite, slate roofs.

Plan: Five-bay nave, full-length aisles with an additional west bay for gallery stairs overlapping the west tower. Very shallow chancel projection. Big three-sided gallery.

Exterior: The style is Gothic, and perhaps because of the granite, more solid appearance convincing than many Commissioners¿ churches. A slim tower dominates the cottages and warehouses which crowd the headland here. It has an embattled parapet with tall pinnacles. Offset buttresses die into the belfry stage with more attached pinnacles. Above the west door is a tall three-light window with transom, and above that the date MDCCCXXXII (1832) in gothic script. Then a clock face, and twinned belfry lights with louvred openings. The main west door is flanked by subsidiary doors giving access to the aisles at the west, and corresponding ones at the east end for the gallery stairs. The aisles have full gables at the west and east, and continuous embattled parapets continuing over the gables. The side walls have six bays divided by slim buttresses rising to pinnacles over the parapets, and long two-light windows with transoms at each bay. Five south windows were replaced in 1920-1 (architects Franklin & Deacon), with tracery including upper quatrefoils; simpler original tracery survives in the north aisle. The triple-gabled east facade looms impressively above Quay Street. The east window stonework was replaced 1986-7, with a large untraceried circle above five lancet lights.

Interior: The entrance porch has a well executed plaster fan vault. In its centre is a plaster portcullis, indicating the involvement of the Church Commissioners in the rebuilding. The traceried head of the inner doorway carries the Lamb and Flag against a cross, taken from the seal of Penzance. The space beneath the west gallery, partitioned off as an inner lobby with metal and glass screens in 1986-7, also has a plaster rib vault, designed like a fan-vault laid out on a flat ground, with a plaster wreath at the centre. This space serves as a meeting room in the absence of a church hall. The nave is light and spacious. Nave and aisles have separate roofs, each of four-centred arched section, with slim ribs forming square panels. The nave ceiling has a large M in a rose at the centre. Five-bay arcades of four-centred arches, on slim piers rising through the gallery fronts. The piers have four shafts and four hollows, with moulded capitals to the shafts only. The gallery front has a decorative frieze below blind arcaded panelling; it turns the west end with canted angles. The openings below the gallery have cambered arches, possibly of cast iron, with traceried spandrels. Transverse beams of cambered section act as ties to the outer walls. The westernmost bay of the north aisle has been screened off as a chapel accessed from the inner lobby, 1986-7. Wood-block floors, 1986-7.

Principal Fixtures: From the former chapel of St Mary is an alms box dated 1612, and a stoup (reportedly the former font). The present pulpit is the prayer desk or pulpit of 1835, in cut-down form: white-painted timber, with gilded mouldings, a foliate carved panel to the book rest, and polygonal shafts at the corners. Matching communion rails with Gothic piercings. The reredos and sanctuary furnishings are otherwise c. 1987, of pale oak with slightly cambered arched panels. The north-west chapel has a Gothic communion table, probably of 1835. Octagonal font, 1874, of fine red and green serpentine with quatrefoil panels. Font cover c. 1959, a delicate swept spire form topped by a gilded dove. Gothic three-seater mayoral chair, with pinnacled top; c. 1835. The oak nave pews are of 1986-7. The seating in the north and south galleries is of 1835, stepped up with swept curves to the top