July 2024
Ullet Road Unitarian Church
Ullet Road Unitarian Church – Liverpool – The exterior doors on the church are in oak with beaten copper cladding in Art Nouveau style designed by Richard Llewellyn Rathbone.
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The Daily Post reported, “every hinge and handle, every bit of tracery and carving, is pleasing to the artistic eye.”
The Ullet Road Church was the first place of worship in the United Kingdom to register a civil partnership for a same-sex couple.
The interior of the church is lined with sandstone from Runcorn quarries. The architectural style is Gothic Revival, with Art Nouveau features.
The architects Thomas and Percy Worthington, Unitarians from Manchester, were commissioned to design the church and associated buildings. The church opened in June 1899.
The accompanying library and other buildings of the Ullet Road Church
In 1900, Gerald Moira (1867-1959), a member of the Art Workers Guild, was commissioned to decorate the new library adjoining the church. He painted allegorical murals on the ceiling, which took him two years to complete. The figures on the ceiling include Moses, Milton, Aristotle, Galileo, Shakespeare, Plato, Homer, St Paul, Gutenberg, and Leonardo, as well as the donor, Sir John Brunner.
The Edgar Wood Center
The Edgar Wood Center is a former Church of Christ Scientist building in Manchester. Edgar Wood designed the church in 1903 in the Expressionist style with Art Nouveau details.
Nikolaus Pevsner considered it “the only religious building in Lancashire that would be indispensable in a survey of twentieth-century church design in all England”.
The church closed in 1971 and was heavily vandalized before reopening as the Edgar Wood Centre in 1975. This closed in 2003.
After days and days of Anglican and Catholic churches, these clean lines and arts and crafts styles were a visual joy.