St Thomas of Canterbury Church, Chester

The Church of St Thomas of Canterbury is an active Anglican parish church in Chester's "Garden Quarter", a densely populated district close to the University of Chester. A Grade II listed building of 1872 designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, it serves a parish whose history reaches back a millennium: the ancient parish of St Oswald, dating from about 980, whose parishioners worshipped for centuries in the south transept of Chester Cathedral itself before making this Victorian church their parish home, and whose registers run from 1580. The patrons remain the Dean and Chapter of Chester Cathedral.

The dedication recalls a medieval predecessor: by 1200 a chapel of St Thomas Becket stood in the graveyard of St Werburgh's Abbey outside the Northgate, in the fork of the later Parkgate and Liverpool roads, serving also as the meeting place of the abbot's manor court of St Thomas. After the Dissolution it became a private house called Green Hall, probably perishing when the northern suburbs were demolished in the Civil War siege, though in 1821 the old chapel was said still to be in use as a barn; the George and Dragon pub now occupies the site. The Victorian church began in 1868 as a chapel of ease for the growing parish, on land from the Dean and Chapter in Parkgate Road; the MP for Chester, H. C. Raikes, laid the cornerstone on 6 April 1869, the west end bricked up to allow later extension, and Bishop William Jacobson consecrated the church on 4 April 1872. In 1880-81 the parishioners agreed to the Dean and Chapter's long-standing suggestion, surrendered their rights in the cathedral's south transept, where the final service was held on Christmas Day 1881, and made St Thomas's the parish church of St Oswald, the Chapter providing £1,500 toward enlarging it. John Oldrid Scott, the architect's son, extended the nave by two bays, added the north porch, organ chamber and vestries, and designed a tower and spire that were never completed: the church remains unfinished to this day, the tower lacking its bell chamber and spire, some window tracery uncut, and the walls perhaps intended for plaster that was never applied. Built of Runcorn red sandstone under a Westmorland slate roof in the Early English Gothic style, it has a five-bay nave, raised chancel, and Lady Chapel at the end of the north aisle.

Under H. E. Burder, vicar from 1909 to 1948, the church embraced the Anglo-Catholic tradition, with daily mass and a sung celebration on Sundays, a character it keeps firmly today: Low Mass three times a week, choral High Mass on Sundays, Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament most Wednesdays, an annual Eucharistic Festival each July, and a cell of Our Lady of Walsingham with a monthly mass. The fittings are worthy of the tradition. Charles Deacon designed two magnificently carved reredoses: the sanctuary reredos of 1909, a memorial to the Reverend E. C. Lowndes, carved with the Instruments of the Passion beneath statues of the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, above a high altar painted with the Annunciation, Nativity and Visitation; and the Lady Chapel reredos of 1913, given by Helen Catherine Tidswell in memory of her husband, with a Madonna and Child above the opening words of the Magnificat, its altar carved with the pelican feeding her young, the Lamb of God and an eagle in flight. The west window is by Kempe, dated 1885; the tower clock by J. B. Joyce of Whitchurch was given at Christmas 1913 by John and Almeida Latham as a thank-offering for the birth of their daughter Beatrice; and the church bell has a wandering history all its own, inscribed for St Oswald's, Chester, it hung successively on Hilbre Island and at Bidston until 1856 before coming here. A south aisle altar with a triptych of St Oswald and St Thomas of Canterbury was dedicated on All Saints' Day 2005.

The parish's history mirrors Chester's. A mission church of the Good Shepherd served the western parish from 1895 to 1919, housing also the Sealand Road infants' school until 1921. The benefice united with Little St John in 1967, was absorbed into the single Chester Team Parish in 1972, losing the ancient name of St Oswald, and regained it on 1 March 2005 when the team parish was dissolved and the new Parish of Saint Oswald and Saint Thomas of Canterbury restored the old patron alongside the church's own. The parish's charitable history runs deep: bread charities from Alderman Edward Batho in 1629 and Edward Russell in 1666, a parish workhouse opened in 1730, and participation from 1762 in Chester's incorporated workhouse on the Roodee, whose successors led to the great Victorian workhouse at Hoole; the surviving parochial charities were united in 1988 as the Chester Parochial Relief in Need Charity. The church's National School in Parkgate Road, opened on 25 March 1873 with help from the National Society, taught the parish's children for 138 years, sheltering Liverpool evacuees in the Second World War, until it closed in July 2011 in favour of the new Chester Blue Coat Church of England Primary School. The handsome red brick vicarage of 1880, designed by the great Chester architect John Douglas, now houses the English Department of the University of Chester.

Today the church's mission statement promises to "welcome all people, proclaim God's love, teach, baptise and nurture, respond to human need with loving service, and rejoice through the beauty of Word, Sacrament and music", sustained by a Sunday school, youth and young adults' groups, a choir, the Mothers' Union and a servers' guild, with a three-manual digital organ of 1996 leading the music in Gilbert Scott's nobly unfinished church, whose patronal feast falls on 29 December, the day of Becket's martyrdom.