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HISTORY |
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St
George's was originally built in 1836-8 as a chapel-of-ease of Edgbaston
parish church (St Bartholemew's), to serve the new suburb rising at the
eastern end of the Calthorpe Estate. A conventional district was assigned
in 1852, extending beyond the estate to the Birmingham parish boundary,
thus including part of the rather different area north of Hagley Road. The
original building consisted of a nave (the present north aisle) and two
aisles, with galleries on three sides -a 'preaching box' church in a
'churchwarden gothic' style described by Pevsner as 'a basic Early English
Style with very attenuated stone arcades'. The architect was J. J.
Scholes, a man mainly associated with high-church buildings, though the
leading lights of the building of St George's, the patron and landlord
George, 3rd Baron Calthorpe, and the Birmingham industrialist J .F.
Ledsam, were evangelicals, as was the first incumbent, Isaac Spooner, son
of a leading Birmingham banker and a relation by marriage of William
Wilberforce. In
1856 the church was enlarged by the addition of a chancel, to the design
of the Birmingham architect Charles Edge, best known for the completion of
Birmingham Town Hall, and the design of the original Market Hall, who
seems to have lived in the parish. After the fashion of the times it was
filled with box pews like the rest of the nave and aisles, while a high
double-decker pulpit under the chancel arch, reached by a long, straight
staircase from behind, blocked view of the communion table. The
building was transformed in 1884-5 by the addition of the existing
spacious and lofty nave, chancel and south aisle by the leading Birmingham
architect J .A. Chatwin, who worked on more than thirty churches in the
city. The old nave, reseated with bench pews, became the north aisle, and
the old chancel the Lady Chapel, though it was not fitted up as a chapel
until 1906: an extant architect's plan shows alternative schemes of a
chapel layout and bench pews facing into the chancel. Remarkably,
considering the scale of the operation, the work was completed in not much
more than a year, and without closing the church for more than four
Sundays! The
interior is notable, besides its impressive scale and proportions, for
some 8, very fine woodwork, by Bridgeman of Lichfield to the design of J.A.
or P.B. Chatwin -clergy
and choir stalls and parclose screen (1885), organ case (1890), reredos
(1903) and Lady Chapel screen (1906); and for a good collection of late
Victorian stained glass: by Burlison and Grylls, Heaton Butler and Bayne,
Hardmans of Birmingham and most particularly a Jesse tree in the Lady
Chapel by C.E. Kempe. At
the beginning of the twentieth century the parish was still full of large
middle-class houses occupied by large middle-class families and their
numerous servants, who provided a congregation to fill the spaces, and
many volunteer ladies to carry on a great bulk and variety of work at a
daughter mission north of Hagley Road. Nowadays the servants are history
and most of the houses are converted to offices, presenting a quite
different challenge for church work, and leaving St George's with one of
the lowest resident populations of any parish in Birmingham. A continuing theme through all the changes in St George's history is work with education. One of the very first actions of the new Select Vestry was the provision of a church school, which opened in 1854 and still flourishes as a small voluntary-aided primary school, in a replacement building dating to 1968. Its most recent inspection report (2003) was as favourable as its first (1857). Carvings in the enlarged church commemorate the presence nearby at the time of institutions for the deaf and for the blind; older members of the congregation still recall the blind children in their regular place at the front of the north aisle, and the deaf at the east end of the gallery, with the service relayed to them in sign language by a teacher stationed under the pulpit. The blind institution has moved, and the deaf closed, but there are in the immediate vicinity of the church three major independent schools and a campus of the University of Central England. An illustrated history of St George's is available in the church, price £2. Justin
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