Up a street leading away from the town centre of Wooler I glimpsed the needle-like spire of a church. Intent on architectural wonders after the Black Bull Inn in my previous post, I climbed the upward-sloping street and quickly found that this was no ordinary church or at least no ordinary church tower, for the rest of the building in truth did seem rather ordinary, a plain nave with a flat wall to the street and a row of simple pointed windows. The tower, however, was something else.
I think of the style of this tower as Arts and Crafts Gothic with a dash of Art Nouveau. That’s to say, the architect (it’s George Reavell again) has taken the basic elements of the Perpendicular Gothic of the 15th century (pointed arches, window tracery with pronounced vertical elements but also transoms,* stone panelling that looks like blind windows, gargoyles, crenellations) and added other features that you’d never seen on a medieval building. Chief of these added things are the chunky pinnacles that lack the spirelets that top medieval pinnacles having instead little roofs with a curvy profile. Another such feature is the way in which the crenellations have tops that curve and dip towards the middle of each section. The curves up here are less Gothic than Art Nouveau and add a fin-de-siècle twist of lemon Victorian Gothic.
Hats off, then, to George Reavell, who made this building over and gave it its outstanding tower in 1904 for the Congregational (now United Reformed) Church. There’s almost a touch of the admirable late Gothic of J. D. Sedding’s magnificent Holy Trinity Sloane Square, dubbed ‘the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts’ by John Betjeman. Not quite a cathedral, but an outstanding bit of architecture of which this modest Northumberland town should be proud. *
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* Apologies for the less than perfect picture. It was impossible to photograph this tower without at least one car and one overhead wire getting in the way. From this angle, the tower conceals another pleasing Reavell detail: a small louvre and spirelet crowning the nave roof.