Taken from The Norfolk Churches Site: an occasional sideways glance at the churches of Norfolk
Christ Church has stood for 167 years as the place of worship in New Catton. Between 1816 and 1821 there was a sudden influx of agricultural workers into Norwich. New Catton was established outside the city walls to the north as a distinct settlement of about 1100 people, many of whom became weavers.
Christian work among the new settlers began in 1818 with the establishment of a nonconformist Sunday school.
By the 1830s the settlement was expanding and on 23rd June 1840 the foundation stone of Christ Church New Catton was laid. Christ Church was the first church to be built outside the city walls and was designed in the Gothic Lancet style using flint and gault brick dressing – both locally sourced materials, characteristic of the region. The entire cost of the work was £2400. The Bishop of Norwich consecrated the church on 16th November 1841, the occasion being marked by a procession and demonstration by the Chartists.
Christ Church is a grade II listed building and is in regular use for worship, marriages, baptisms and funerals. It is an important part of the heritage of Norwich.
Christ Church is a grand and rather surprising church in the working class Victorian and Edwardian suburbs to the north of Norwich city centre. It predates the housing around it. The west frontage is pre-ecclesiological, but intricate, as if rather more than just the enthusiasm of some 1830s local Gothick carpenter. In fact, it is the 1842 work of John Brown, who in the 1830s and 1840s was designing high quality Commissioners churches for the Diocese, and thus was one of the first Victorian churches in Norfolk.
Here is a mature architect working without the constraints of the pattern books of the Camden Society and the imperatives of the Oxford Movement. Christ Church was his first project after Hainford All Saints, a few miles off. The design is very similar, except that here gault brick was used instead of red brick and flint. Early English the style might be, but those spirelets lift the eye to heaven as surely as any Perpendicular architecture.
This is a church which appears larger inside than it does outside. You step through the west porch into a pleasingly light interior which is a lovely example of the decade. Pevsner describes a poor timber roof, but this is most unfair: Brown created an elaborate, airy roof structure which has in recent years been returned to what were probably its original colours. A south transept with a delicious late Arts and Crafts window forms the parish war memorial, with a staggering number of names. This has become an area for quiet prayer in a church which is open every day, a valuable resource in an inner-city suburb - other churches might well follow the example.Old photographs of the interior show an altar hard against the east wall, hemmed in by altar rails, with choir stalls cluttering the chancel aisles. But these are gone today: the altar stands west of the last bays of the arcades, and looks as if it was always intended to be there. Thus, liturgical reforms have brought about a harmony not intended by the architect. Curiously, the older photographs also show that, since the 1960s, the original benches have been replaced by the current range, painted the same soft green as the roof and walls.It would be interesting to know where they came from.
Christ Church was built at a time when Norwich was just beginning to stretch its wings as an industrial city. Overlooking all from the west are the Victorian royal arms, installed for a young monarch in her early twenties, at an optimistic moment when anything must have seemed possible.
Simon Knott, February 2009
“If anybody would like to expand to this series please do, I would just ask that you could let Sadexploration know first so he can keep track of the Church numbers and names to avoid duplication.
There is also a Church Micro Stats & Information page found via the Bookmark list”
Congratulations AJM580 on FTF