St George's Church, Heaviley

St George's Church on Buxton Road in Heaviley, Stockport, is by any measure one of the great Victorian churches of England. The authors of the Buildings of England call it "by far the grandest church of Stockport... a church on a splendid scale", and according to the church's visitors' guide, Geoffrey Fisher, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, went further: he pronounced it "the finest church built in England since the Reformation". Grade I listed, it remains an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Chester, its benefice united with St Gabriel's, Adswood.

The church was the gift of a brewer. George Fearn, a local man, paid for the entire group of buildings — church, vicarage and schools — at a total cost said to approach £80,000, the equivalent of nearly £9 million today. The architect was Hubert Austin of the great Lancaster practice of Paley, Austin and Paley, and St George's is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The foundation stone was laid in 1893 and the church consecrated on 25 February 1897.

The scale is cathedral-like. Built of Runcorn red sandstone in the Perpendicular style — with, the connoisseurs note, "traces of Art Nouveau" — the church is 180 feet long and 75 wide, with a crossing tower 112 feet high whose embattled parapet and corner pinnacles are linked by flying buttresses to a spire rising to 236 feet, a landmark across south Manchester. The plan comprises a six-bay clerestoried nave with north and south aisles and porches, the crossing tower, and a chancel and sanctuary flanked by a Lady Chapel to the north, organ chamber to the south and vestry to the south-east. The east and west windows have seven lights each, those along the nave four, and great buttresses flank the east end.

The furnishings match the architecture. The reredos, of Derbyshire alabaster carved by Robert Bridgeman of Lichfield, holds three panels — the Crucifixion at the centre, the Virgin Mary and St John beside — and Bridgeman also carved the alabaster font with its foliage. The pulpit carries six niched figures of Saints Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Peter; the lectern is a brass eagle on a pedestal supported by lions; and the Lady Chapel, divided from the chancel by a carved oak screen, has its own oak reredos with figures of St John the Divine and St John the Baptist. The stained glass — found only in the east and west windows and one south aisle window — is all by Shrigley and Hunt of Lancaster, the east window fittingly including St George and the Dragon. The three-manual organ was built in 1897 by Forster and Andrews for £1,710, in a case designed by Austin himself, and was rebuilt by the John Compton Organ Company in 1936 with further work by Rushworth and Dreaper in 1981. The tower carries a ring of ten bells, all cast in 1896 by Mears and Stainbank at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

The churchyard holds a particularly fine sandstone war memorial of about 1920, listed Grade II: panels inscribed with the names of 137 men of the parish who died in the First World War, beneath a tall cross and a statue of St George standing under a gabled, crocketed canopy. The churchyard wall and gate piers, and those of the adjacent church school, are also Grade II listed, as is the former vicarage of about 1920 — a two-storey Arts and Crafts house of red brick, listed in 1975 but since described, sadly, as "ruinous". The church itself, however, stands in full vigour — the brewer's gift and Austin's genius, still serving its parish a hundred and thirty years on, and still, by some reckonings, the finest English church since the Reformation.