St Paul's Church

St Paul's was opened in 1959 to serve the New Parson Cross estate which had been constructed on previous greenfield land in the late 1940s as the City of Sheffield cleared its slum housing and expanded into the countryside. The church was designed by the Scottish architect Basil Spence who was forced to work with a limited budget. Spence was working on his most famous design Coventry Cathedral at the same time that he was overseeing the construction of St Paul's. When St Paul's was opened in 1959 it did not have its own parish and was purely a daughter church to St Mary's, Ecclesfield. However the area around St Paul's was declared a Conventional District within the Ecclesfield parish and…

Spence's design for St Paul's is quite simple although this is not obvious at first glance. The church is basically two brick walls joined by a shallow barrel vault roof strengthened by diagonal steel bracing. The ends of the church consist almost entirely of glass with Spence integrating some the ideas he had used at St Oswald's, Tile Hill in 1957. To the front of the church is a 15 m high campanile consisting of just two brick walls with concrete ties in between. There is a 6 m cross on top of the campanile. The church hall stands just to the north within the church grounds. The interior has a balcony reached by steps on which the organ stands. While the altar is screened to give it some…