Building for Faith II: Nonconformist and Other Faiths

The architecture of Elmwood Presbyterian Church, University Road, Belfast, was described by architectural historian Sir Charles Brett as ‘pleasantly eccentric’ (Buildings of Belfast 1700-1914 (Belfast, 1967), 43). The architect, John Corry, was an amateur. A son of the Belfast builder Robert Corry, and brother of James, contractor for a number of buildings in Belfast, John was in charge of the London branch of the family firm of contractors and ship-owners. His church, with its arcaded loggia, elaborate frieze, corbelled courses and coloured marble decoration, is lavishly Italianate, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin. Internally, the nave was broad and wide, with a fine coffered plaster ceiling and ornate pulpit (since removed). The main body of the church was completed in 1862 and this drawing, prepared a decade later, is for the addition of the exuberant tower, completed in 1873.

Elmwood Church ceased to be used as a place of worship in the early 1970s, and was converted into Elmwood Hall, a concert, conference and exhibition venue for Queen’s University Belfast.

Scottish architect Andrew Heiton won the competition to design Rathgar Presbyterian Church, Dublin, in 1860, and he subsequently designed two other Presbyterian churches in Dublin: the Abbey or Findlater Memorial Church in Parnell Square (1862-64) and the Mission Church in Jervis Street (1864). His tendency to stray from the more restrained Gothic employed for other Presbyterian churches is best exemplified in the Parnell Square Church where a French Gothic influence is visible in the tall spire, traceried windows and profusion of carving (12.2). Young and Mackenzie’s First Presbyterian Church, Armagh (1879), is a spiritual successor to Heiton in its delicate massing and ornament but the same practice was also responsible for the subtly different Tudor Gothic Carlisle Road Fourth Presbyterian Church in Londonderry (also 1879), a neat summation of the stylistic choices by then available to Presbyterian congregations.

Methodists also embraced the Gothic, perhaps nowhere more exuberantly than in W. H. Lynn’s Carlisle Memorial Church, Belfast (1875), with the immense verticality of its spire (12.3). William Barre’s University Road Methodist Church, Belfast (1865) is in red brick with polychrome bands, deliberately asymmetric and eclectic, but still unmistakeably Venetian Revival, and once again underscores how different denominations were following similar stylistic paths.

While the earliest mention of a Jewish presence in Ireland can be dated to 1079, a permanent Jewish settlement was not established until the late fifteenth century. The first recorded synagogue was in a building on Crane Lane, Dublin in 1663 (since destroyed), although, as with other incoming faiths, early places of worship were often in private houses. The size of the Jewish community waxed and waned over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and from 1835 the Jewish community in Dublin gathered in a converted Presbyterian meeting house in Mary’s Abbey. A new wave of refugees, mainly Lithuanian, settled around Clanbrassil Street in Dublin in the 1880s. They wanted synagogues within walking distance, in keeping with Sabbath rules, and numerous small synagogues opened in repurposed buildings in that area, including Walworth Road (1918, now the Jewish Museum). Jewish communities also settled, and made provision for worship, in Belfast, Cork, Limerick and elsewhere.

It would appear that the first of a very small number of purpose-built synagogues on the island of Ireland was on Great Victoria Street, Belfast (demolished). A Ruskinian Gothic edifice, it was designed by Francis Stirrat in 1871. The transfer of congregations from building to building has been one of the defining characteristics of Jewish worship in Ireland, and in 1892 the Mary’s Abbey congregation transferred to Dublin’s first purpose-built synagogue. Located on Adelaide Road, it was designed by John Joseph O’Callaghan in an oriental, Byzantine style (largely demolished, except for the façade). The foundation stone for a new Cork synagogue on South Terrace, designed by Arthur Hill, was laid in February 1913 (12.5). A new synagogue on the site of Grenville Hall on Dublin’s South Circular Road was designed in the classical style by Aubrey Vincent O’Rourke (1925). The Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation’s restrained stripped classical synagogue was built on Leicester Avenue, Rathgar It opened in 1952 and extended in 1996. Catering to a new generation of suburban Orthodox Jews, the Terenure Synagogue by Wilfred Cantwell was completed in 1953 (12.6). It is a modernist building with five Stars of David proclaiming its purpose on its otherwise minimal façade.

The first mosque in Ireland was in a converted Georgian building, 7 Harrington Street in Dublin (1977, since closed). The first new mosque in Ireland was built in 1986 in Ballyhaunis, Co.  Mayo. Purpose-built mosque architecture tends to be idiosyncratic, dependent on the personal taste of the client and the architect, a trend typified by Ballyhaunis which is architecturally torn between the local vernacular and that of the South Asian diaspora it still serves.

In Dublin, as Jews were moving out of the South Circular Road area, Muslims were moving in. They bought the former Donore Presbyterian Church in 1984. Designed in 1881 by William Stirling, the only outward change to its restrained Gothic Revival architecture has been in the replacement of the cross with a crescent on the finial. Inside, the pews have been removed and a carpet laid for prayer. A minbar (pulpit), mihrab (niche), and gallery are the other additions (12.7).

The 1996 Clonskeagh Mosque in Dublin was designed by Michael Collins & Associates as a post-modernist mixed-use translation of Islamic motifs into structural steel with brick infill (12.8). Steel is also used to decorate the façade and windows. It is the largest mosque in Ireland but is very much a product of Middle Eastern taste for grand statements. Geometric abstraction is evident in its skeletal minaret, coffered ceilings and general use of decorative brick, following proportions which have significance in Islam and carefully avoiding figurative imagery.