St Thomas' Church, Stockport

St Thomas' Church in St Thomas's Place, off Wellington Road South in Stockport, is one of the grandest Greek Revival churches in the north of England — a Grade I listed Commissioners' church of the 1820s that, after two centuries of Anglican worship, has begun a new life as St Mary and St Thomas Coptic Orthodox Church.

The church was a product of the great post-Waterloo programme of church building: it received a grant from the Church Building Commission, and when it was built Stockport lay in Cheshire — this was the only church in that county to receive money from the Commission's first parliamentary grant. The architect was George Basevi, cousin of Disraeli and designer of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and St Thomas' was one of his earlier works — and is his only surviving Commissioners' church. Built between 1822 and 1825 by the contractors Samuel Buxton and Son, on land given by Lady Warren-Bulkeley, it cost £15,611 (about £1.26 million today), against a Commission grant of £15,636 which also covered site costs and legal fees. It was consecrated on 25 September 1825 as a daughter church of St Mary's, Stockport, and at its opening could seat a remarkable two thousand people.

Basevi built in ashlar Runcorn sandstone on a rectangular plan six bays long, with a clock tower at the west end and, at the east, a massive portico whose pediment rides on six Ionic columns — placed at the east because that end then fronted the main road. A recessed central entrance beneath the portico leads to the galleries, with flanking doors to the vestries. The tower carries pedimented bell openings, a clock stage with a face on each side and ball finials at the corners, and is crowned by an open cupola on eight plain columns — though Basevi was unhappy with modifications the Commissioners imposed on his tower designs here and at St Mary's, Greenwich, and these remained the only two churches he designed for them. The north and south sides have two tiers of windows, round-arched above and segmental-headed below.

Inside, galleries run around three sides on square columns that continue upward as fluted Corinthian columns to the ceiling — the original seating has gone, but the galleries survive. The church was refurbished by T. H. Allen in 1881, and in 1890 Medland Taylor remodelled the chancel, which is raised and surrounded on three sides by a balustrade: a semi-circular pulpit, stone below and ironwork above, projects from the balustrade's north side, answered by a brass eagle lectern on the south. The marble reredos behind the high altar is carved with the Annunciation, and above it hangs a copy of part of Raphael's Transfiguration. The south aisle holds St John's Altar, moved from the mission church of St John when it closed in 1941, the east end of the north aisle serves as the Lady Chapel, and the baptistry has an octagonal font on a mosaic floor of fishes. The late nineteenth-century stained glass depicts scenes from the life of Jesus. The three-manual organ was made in 1834 by Samuel Renn, its choir division added by Jardine in 1868, and the whole cleaned and overhauled by Alex Young in 1890.

In its final Anglican decades the church stood in the modern Catholic tradition of the Church of England, with Sunday and festival services accompanied by a robed choir, and considerable money was spent keeping the great building alive: the roof was replaced, the clock faces and upper tower repaired, new washrooms and disabled access installed in 2014 at a cost of £45,000 to fit the church for concerts and recitals, and the upper gallery ceilings completely restored in 2016. But congregations dwindled, and in December 2024 St Thomas' was decommissioned as a parish church of the parish of Stockport and Brinnington.

Its story did not end there. In 2026 the building was purchased by the local congregation of the Coptic Orthodox Church and renamed St Mary and St Thomas Coptic Orthodox Church. Renovated once more, Basevi's great Greek Revival preaching box now holds regular worship for the large and varied Coptic Orthodox community of Manchester and the surrounding areas — an ancient Christian tradition filling a building made for the industrial congregations of Regency Stockport.