Emmanuel Church is one of many hundreds of parish churches that were constructed in urban areas during the course of the nineteenth century. Its brick construction is an indication of its late nineteenth century date. For many years, fashions in church building decreed that churches should be constructed of stone. It was only with the bold use of brick in the distinctive churches of William Butterfield and John Loughborough Pearson, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that brick came into widespread use in the construction of churches.
From about 1840 it became fashionable to build churches in the ‘Gothic Revival’ architectural style, the nineteenth century’s updated revision of the styles of church architecture in use from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. There are echoes of this style in the architecture of Emmanuel Church, principally the tall pointed arches (a standard requirement for Gothic Revival) and the narrow lancet windows, typical of ‘Early English’ the earliest style of original Gothic, dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. ‘Early English’ was definitely an unfashionable style in the nineteenth century, architects preferring larger windows with elaborate ‘Decorated’ or ‘Perpendicular’ tracery. ‘Decorated’ in particular was considered by the Ecclesiologists to be the ‘perfection’ of the style; ‘Early English’ was dismissed as primitive and ‘Perpendicular’ was considered a sign of the decline of the Gothic style.
The typical feature of the Early English phase is the narrow lancet window, a feature that Emmanuel Church possesses in abundance, compared with the wide traceried windows of the ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’ phases.
Emmanuel Church is sometimes described as being ‘basilican’ in plan. A basilica is a rectangular building with a main aisle, two side aisles, a double colonnade, and an apse at the opposite end to the main entrance. This is derived from state and civic architecture in the Roman empire, and was adopted by the earliest Christian churches. Although Emmanuel Church has some elements of a ‘basilica’, other traditional elements, including a coffered ceiling, are missing.
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