St Stephen and All Martyrs Church Lever Bridge

One of the most remarkable Victorian churches in the North West, and the first church in England to be built substantially of terracotta.

The first of the "pot churches"

St Stephen and All Martyrs was built between 1842 and 1844 to the design of Edmund Sharpe. Apart from the foundations, the rubble infill of the walls and the slate roof, the entire building is terracotta — chosen because it was cheap and durable, and made locally by the Ladyshore Coal and Terra Cotta Company, which belonged to Sharpe's brother-in-law John Fletcher.

Because terracotta was the stuff of flower pots, Sharpe himself called this church and its two successors his "pot churches". He built only three — the others are Holy Trinity, Rusholme, and St Paul's, Scotforth. Terracotta went on to become a common material in the industrial North, but it was almost never used again for churches.

The building

The plan is cruciform: nave, west porch, two transepts, a short chancel and a vestry. Inside, a timber hammerbeam roof rests on terracotta corbels, and the material is worked throughout into friezes, ball-flowers, foliage and inscriptions — decoration that would have been prohibitively expensive in carved stone.

Sources: St Stephen and All Martyrs' Church, Lever Bridge — Wikipedia; Architects of Greater Manchester.