Details
392/0/10165 FOX STREET
16-OCT-01 RC St Mary of the Angels, with attache
d Friary, arch, bell frame, walls, rai
lings and gates
II
Roman Catholic Church and attached friary. 1907-10 to the designs of Pugin and Pugin, at the expense of Miss Amy Elizabeth Rosalie Imrie for the Franciscan order. Italian High Renaissance style.
Brown brick with stone bands and dressings, slate roofs. Seven bay nave with aisles, with narthex, one bay chancel and apsed sanctuary. Lady Chapel, side chapels and vestries treated separately under separate roofs, as are the baptistry and side chapel either side of the central front door. Attached arch of brick leads to attached Friary at rear of site. The intended tower was never built above ground floor height, and the bellframe and bell were set in front of it.
Main three-bay (liturgical) west front treated simply in the Italian Renaissance style. Buttresses flank central circular window under gable with broken cornice line and decorated with cut brick modillions. Under the window a pair of double doors placed centrally under segmental arched toplights set within single round-arched opening dominated by carved figure of Our Lady flanked by angels. Two-light openings under roundel set in round-arched openings to either side. Cut brick cornice frieze to the side walls and to apse, with segmental-arched windows to clerestory, aisles and longer lancets to side chapels and vestries.
Church interior. Flat timber ceiling of square panels, heavily moulded in Renaissance style. Round-arched arcades of short marble columns brought from Italy. Smaller shafts of red and green marble at east end of arcade and flanking chancel arch. Marble facing to sanctuary apse, with mosaic decoration above. Organ at west end over screen wall. Short pews to nave. The communion rail and sanctuary floor are said to have come from a demolished church in Rome, though added to in matching marbles. The present nave altar, adapted from the pulpit in recent years, is of coloured marbles, perhaps of C18 origins. The holy water stoups are from a church in Rome. The two doorways leading from the eastern end of the aisles are fitted with C17 or C18 carved stone doorcases and panelled timber doors, are believed to have come from a Roman palazzo. The High Altar is C16 and is believed to have come from the Cathedral of S Pietro in Bologna. The altarpiece is a copy of a Perugino from the Accademia delle Belli Arti in Bologna but with the figures of St Francis, St Anthony, St Elizabeth and St Clare added below, in accordance with Miss Imrie's instruction. The altar to St Francis came from the same demolished church in Rome as the communion rail and sanctuary floor and dates from about 1750. The Lady Chapel altar is C18, and is said to have come from the Naples area. The statue of the Virgin was commissioned from Zaccagnini, a C20 Roman sculptor. The altar of St Anthony is said to have come from St Maria del Priorate, a C18 century church belonging to the Knights of Malta at the foot of the Aventine Hill in Rome. The Stations of the Cross are copies of those by Tiepolo in the church of the Friars in Venice, and were commissioned by Miss Imrie.
Ancillary Buildings. Six-bay friary, now used for student accommodation. Three storeys, with paired windows on ground floor, segmental-arched windows over, and high parapet over cornice of cut-brick modillions. Interior with round arches to hallway and simple cornices. Open bell frame with hanging bell, set by fragment of bell-tower under pyramidal roof. Round-arch opening leads to former Friary. Low brick walls with iron railings and gates surround the scheme.
Miss Imrie (nee Pollard) was adopted by, and took the name of, her uncle, William Imrie of the White Star Shipping Line, one of Liverpool's leading companies. She became a Roman Catholic, and had a great devotion to St Francis and St Clare, becoming herself a Poor Clare, and spending most of her life as Abbess of a convent at Sclerder in Cornwall. She had clear ideas about how her church should look, and determined that it should be modelled on the great Franciscan church of S Maria d'Ara Coeli in Rome. She was anxious that it should be `something different from the ordinary run of Gothic churches, which are rather commonplace, and it seemed to me a good plan to have something that might give the people of Liverpool, who cannot go abroad, some... idea of what the churches of Rome are like.' It is thus very different from the Gothic style normally associated with the work of Pugin and Pugin. The church includes marble columns and facings brought from Italy and many Italian altarpieces, works of art and other fixtures. Included as an exceptionally careful example of an Italian Renaissance revival church, with fine fittings, built at great expense and with an extraordinary single-mindedness of purpose.
Listing NGR: SJ3523791458
