Church of St Mark, Broomhill, Sheffield

The Church of St Mark is a Church of England parish church in the Broomhill suburb of Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, and one of the most remarkable churches in the city. Dedicated to St Mark the Evangelist, it is a building of two distinct ages welded into one: a Victorian Gothic tower and spire that survived the destruction of the Sheffield Blitz, joined to a boldly modern church of the early 1960s. The result is so successful a dialogue between old and new that in 2013 the Twentieth Century Society named St Mark's one of the ten best modern church buildings in the United Kingdom — a striking accolade for a church that rose, quite literally, from the ashes of war.

Broomhill grew up in the early nineteenth century as Sheffield expanded rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, the great age of the city's steel and cutlery trades. To serve the spiritual needs of this new suburb, a church dedicated to St Mark was founded on the present site in 1854, paid for by the steelmaker William Butcher — one of the industrialists whose wealth built so much of Victorian Sheffield. The first building was a prefabricated structure of galvanised iron, of the type popularly known as a "tin tabernacle", always intended to be temporary; it served until 1868, when work began on a grand permanent church in the Gothic Revival style, designed by the architect William Henry Crossland. Crossland's church was completed in 1871 and served the community of Broomhill for the next seven decades.

That fine Victorian church met a violent end. On the night of 12 December 1940, during the devastating air raids that became known as the Sheffield Blitz, Crossland's building was largely destroyed by an incendiary bomb. When the site was cleared, all that remained standing was the two-stage south-west tower, with its south porch below and its crocketed spire rising above — a lone survivor of the old church amid the ruins.

For more than twenty years the future of the site hung in the balance. In 1955 the architect George Pace, who had been appointed surveyor to the Diocese of Sheffield in 1949 and was one of the most distinguished church architects of his generation, was commissioned to stabilise and restore the surviving tower and to design a new church to bring St Mark's back to life. The brief required him to retain Crossland's Victorian tower and incorporate it into the new building, but it also gave him the freedom to work in his own preferred modern style, using contemporary materials and methods. The building remained a ruin for a further six years as Pace developed his designs; only on his third attempt, a somewhat scaled-down scheme, did his proposal win the approval of the diocese — a decision shaped as much by cost as by architectural merit. Construction began in 1961, and the new church was completed and reconsecrated in September 1963 by the Bishop of Sheffield.

Pace's design is a masterpiece of pragmatic modernism. Rather than imitate the Victorian Gothic of the surviving tower, he used the architectural language of modernism to create a unified structure that incorporates the old fabric without being subservient to it — a "dialogue of styles" that the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner singled out as a particular strength of the design. The new building rises within a reinforced-concrete frame, its cavity walls filled with rubble stone, incorporating some of the old fabric up to plinth level so that the new church grows organically from the ruins of the old. Its north and south elevations are filled with a repeating pattern of tall, narrow windows, and the interior is flooded with the rich colour of fine modern stained glass, giving the church a luminous and contemplative atmosphere quite different from that of a conventional parish church. Crossland's tower and porch were awarded Grade II listed status in 1973, and in 1999 the listing was revised to encompass the whole church, recognising the modern building as a work of equal importance.

The marriage of Crossland's Victorian spire and Pace's modern church has made St Mark's one of the most admired and architecturally significant churches in Sheffield, a place of pilgrimage for lovers of twentieth-century architecture as well as a living place of worship. Since 2000 it has served the amalgamated parishes of Broomhill and Broomhall, continuing its long ministry to this part of the city.

St Mark's stands in Broomhill, a leafy and characterful suburb to the west of Sheffield city centre, long associated with the University of Sheffield, whose campus and student community lie close by; the poet John Betjeman is said to have called Broomhill the prettiest suburb in England. The church is within easy reach of the university and its concert and arts venues, the Botanical Gardens, the Weston Park Museum, the green expanses of the Peak District National Park to the west, and the cultural life of the reborn city of Sheffield.

From a tin tabernacle of 1854 paid for by a Sheffield steelmaker, through William Henry Crossland's grand Gothic church of 1871, its destruction in the Sheffield Blitz of 1940, and George Pace's bold modern rebuilding of 1963 around the surviving spire, the Church of St Mark gathers a dramatic story of loss and renewal into one building. A listed church named among the finest modern churches in Britain, it remains the living Anglican parish church of Broomhill — a luminous meeting of Victorian Gothic and twentieth-century modernism, and one of the architectural treasures of Sheffield.