Church of St John the Divine, Calder Grove

The Church of St John the Divine at Calder Grove, in Crigglestone on the south-western edge of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, is a small but charming former church, built as a mission church in 1892–93 to the designs of the architect William Swinden Barber. A Grade II listed building of Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts character, it was the gift of a local benefactress in memory of her husband, and though it has now closed as a place of worship, it remains a fine example of the small Victorian mission churches that once served the mining and rural communities of industrial Yorkshire.

The church was commissioned by Mrs Mary Elizabeth Mackie in memory of her husband, John Mackie, a Justice of the Peace who died in 1891. The Mackies were a wealthy local family: John Mackie's father, Robert Jefferson Mackie, was a rich corn factor of Scottish descent, and one of John's brothers, Robert Bownas Mackie, served as Liberal Member of Parliament for Wakefield. John himself was a landowner and industrialist, the owner of Cliff Colliery and the Freeclay works in Crigglestone, and a notable local benefactor; he lived at Cliff House in Calder Grove, and through his marriage to Mary Elizabeth Ingham, daughter of a calico printer of New Mills in Derbyshire, the couple divided their time between Calder Grove and Derbyshire. Mary Mackie had already commissioned the church of St James the Less and some almshouses at New Mills, designed by the same architect, William Swinden Barber, in 1878–80, and the church at Calder Grove is not dissimilar in character.

William Swinden Barber, the architect, was a Yorkshire designer responsible for a number of churches in the region, including St Thomas's at Thurstonland. At Calder Grove he produced a small, plain and simple building in the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts manner, built to serve the coal-mining and rural community that then surrounded it, in the parish of St James, Chapelthorpe. The exterior is modest, and the interior was deliberately low church in its arrangement; but the building's great glory is its fine scissor-truss roof, which remarkably retains its original stencil paintings of 1892 — a delightful survival of Victorian decorative art.

For more than a century the little church served its community, just off Denby Dale Road in Calder Grove. In the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century, however, with congregations dwindling, the church was closed in 2018. It was purchased in 2020, and plans were approved by Wakefield Council in 2024 to convert the building into a four-bedroom home — a new use that will at least preserve the fabric of this attractive little church for the future.

The former church stands in Calder Grove, in Crigglestone on the south-western edge of Wakefield, in the valley of the River Calder in West Yorkshire. The city of Wakefield, with its cathedral, its medieval chantry chapel on the bridge, and the Hepworth Wakefield art gallery, lies a short distance to the north-east, along with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at nearby Bretton, the National Coal Mining Museum for England at Overton, and the wider countryside of West Yorkshire, with the Pennines rising to the west.

From its building in 1892–93 as a mission church given by Mary Mackie in memory of her husband, the work of the architect William Swinden Barber, through more than a century of service to the mining community of Calder Grove, to its closure in 2018 and conversion to a home, the Church of St John the Divine gathers the history of a Victorian Yorkshire community into one small building. A Grade II listed church with its rare stencilled roof, it stands as a memory of the faith and philanthropy of industrial West Yorkshire — a charming survival on the edge of Wakefield.