36
BCD Special Report on
Historic Churches
17th annual edition
In about 1916, Coates Carter closed his
ofce in Cardif and retired to Prestbury,
near Cheltenham. He became churchwarden
at his local church, St Mary’s, where he is
memorialised. After the frst world war, work
began to trickle back in from Wales and he
entered an architectural Indian summer. Perhaps
living at a distance lent a kind of enchantment,
or at least detachment, for the churches of his
last decade are simpler and more timeless. Tey
are pure, pared-down buildings, stripped of
historicist details, intended as the setting for
coloured, gilded furnishings and for the glamour
of late-medieval pre-Reformation worship.
Tese late works, designed after the formal
disestablishment of the Welsh church in 1920,
sound a trumpet-blast on behalf of what Coates
Carter and his co-religionists probably saw as
the ‘old religion’ of Wales, deeply rooted long
before up-start, nonconformist Protestantism
scattered the land with chapels and came to
dominate the popular culture. Tey are the
fruits of Welsh Anglicanism re-born and newly
energetic, set free by disestablishment from any
direct connexion with politics and the state.
Tey reach back to ally themselves with the
archaic, heroic age of the national myth and
its literature, before the arrival of narrow and
judgmental Calvinism. Tey look backward
to look forward; paradoxically using high-
Anglicanism as a vehicle for demonstrating
Welsh architectural identity. In his last complete
church, at Llandeloy in Pembrokeshire, a
county then rich in vernacular building
traditions, Coates Carter literally re-invents
the past to serve the future in a creative way.
In the last four years of his life Coates
Carter conceived a handful of exceptional
churches employing local materials and
identifably Welsh vernacular motifs. Tree
of these began building before his death and
they survive in varying degrees of completion
or dereliction and under varying degrees of
threat. One is in suburban Newport, another
on a magnifcently dramatic site above an
industrial community in the south Wales
St Luke, Abercarn (1923–26) has been long-abandoned on its precipitous site in the south Wales valleys: (top right) the top stage of the tall tower with typical south Wales
vernacular details; (below centre) the abandoned reinforced concrete interior in the 1980s, looking south-east.
SS Julius and Aaron, Newport (1923–27) from the
south-west: astonishingly powerful for a British
church of the 1920s
valleys, and the third is in rural Pembrokeshire.
Although they are dissimilar in form and scale,
each manages to achieve a sense of being
rooted in the varying physical, emotional
and political landscape of Welshness.
SS Julius and Aaron, Newport, Gwent,
is a glorious fragment. Between 1910 and
1917 Coates Carter designed at least three
increasingly elaborate schemes for the site,
but the peacetime rise in building costs made
them unachievable. Work fnally started on the
fourth, and simplest, in 1923. Less than half of
the church had been built when the architect
died and building work ceased in 1927.
Missing both its lady chapel and
vestries, and with a hugely truncated nave,
the church is difcult to comprehend from
outside, notwithstanding the vast sweep of
its pantiled roof and its ruggedly impressive
sandstone walls, punched-through with
blunt four-centred openings. Te west front,
intended to be temporary, is an elemental
statement of favourite Coates Carter themes:
a four-plane roof profle, dramatically paired
windows, buttresses only where they are
essential. Even in its unfnished state and
without its intended painted furnishings,
the inside (see title illustration) is impressive
and makes one long for more. It is an aisled
holy barn, in which tall concrete columns
carry wide brick arches supporting superb
open timber roofs; a sheltering aerial forest
of bold tie beams and rippling wind-braces.
A visit to the second of these churches,
St Luke, Abercarn, is today a melancholy
and afecting experience. Built between 1923
and 1926 of only two materials, beautifully
dressed sandstone and reinforced concrete,
its magnifcent integrity survives even after
30 years of abandonment to the vandals and
the comprehensive destruction of everything
that could be wrecked, smashed or burned.
Te steeply sloping site is ravishing, and
Coates Carter makes the most of it. A tall,
slender tower, of impeccable south Wales
provenance, is set far up the slope. Te
staggering west front, its paired high windows
creating an unconventional duality, rises like
a clif above a dramatic formal arrangement
of steps. Inside the cave-like entrance, under
an archway worthy of the American architect
HH Richardson (1838–1886),
ingeniously
contrived concrete stairs continue the ascent,
past a substantial hall and concrete-vaulted
chapel, to emerge into a forest of concrete
arcades as dense as a Welsh oak wood.
Externally, its austere, squared-of forms,
perfectly calculated texture and understated
references to local archetypes come as close
to Richardson’s ideal of ‘quiet and massive’
architecture as anything in these islands.
At Abercarn, the use of local vernacular
elements combined with an interest in the
possibilities of new building technology – albeit
in the service of traditional forms – suggest
an art which faces in two directions at once.