All Souls Church, Halifax

All Souls' Church crowns Haley Hill in Halifax, West Yorkshire, its 236-foot spire — taller than that of any parish church for miles — soaring above the mill town that built it. This is the church Sir George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific architect of the Victorian age, considered his finest; and it stands as the centrepiece of one of England's great experiments in industrial paternalism. Grade I listed, redundant since 1979 and now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, it remains one of the supreme monuments of the Gothic Revival in the north of England.

The church was commissioned and paid for by Edward Akroyd, the Halifax worsted manufacturer whose mills made him one of Yorkshire's wealthiest industrialists. The foundation stone was laid on 25 April 1856, and the completed church was consecrated in 1859. It was conceived as the centrepiece of Akroydon, Akroyd's model village for his workers — Scott designed not only the church but Akroyd's own house and garden, the vicarage and houses for the mill employees, a complete vision of industrial community with the church at its summit. A statue of Akroyd still stands in its own lawned enclosure immediately beside the church, surveying what he built.

Scott worked in the style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, on a cruciform plan: a clerestoried nave of eighty-seven feet with north and south aisles, transepts, a chancel flanked by chapels, a south porch with a triple-arched arcade, and at the north-west angle the tower and its magnificent spire, divided into five stages by moulded bands and set with gabled windows, finished with finial and weathervane. The west doorway is deeply recessed beneath a sculptured tympanum, and the clerestory carries fifteen windows a side.

What makes All Souls extraordinary is the lavishness of its materials — a geological tour of Britain and beyond. The nave arcades stand on columns of Derbyshire marble; the tower and transept piers are Aberdeen granite; the chancel arcades rest on Italian marble; the floor is laid with Minton encaustic tiles in black, red and chocolate; the chancel steps are Nottinghamshire red sandstone; the pulpit is Caen stone on a Derbyshire marble pedestal; and the font is carved from serpentine quarried at the Lizard in Cornwall, carried on Aberdeen granite. All the carving was overseen by the sculptor John Birnie Philip, and the wrought-iron chancel screen on its alabaster plinth was made by Francis Skidmore — the same craftsman who made the Hereford and Lichfield cathedral screens. The alabaster reredos holds statues of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, St John, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and every window in the church contains stained glass by Hardman & Co, William Wailes, or Clayton and Bell. The tower holds a ring of eight bells, all cast in 1859 by G. Mears at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and still in working order. The four-manual organ — once the largest instrument in Halifax, built in 1868 by Forster and Andrews of Hull to a specification by the great Edmund Schulze and enlarged by Norman and Beard in 1902 — awaits restoration, currently unplayable.

The twentieth century was less kind to Haley Hill than the nineteenth. All Souls was declared redundant on 1 March 1979 and vested in the Churches Conservation Trust on 2 August 1989. The boarded-up south porch doorway, an unsightly anti-vandal measure, was replaced when the Trust commissioned a set of iron gates painted reddish-brown to complement Scott's design, their cross and floral motifs gilded, alongside conservation of the porch stonework and the west window surround. In 2007–08 the Trust undertook more extensive repairs, re-roofing parts of the church to make it weatherproof and repairing the stained glass and tracery.

Today All Souls is open to visitors at limited times and during events such as Heritage Open Days — a building no longer required for regular worship but kept, as it deserves, as a complete and almost untouched masterpiece: the church its architect judged the best of the several hundred he built, and the proudest monument of a Victorian mill-owner's belief that industry owed its workers beauty as well as wages.