Continuing our occasional tour of Coventry’s collection of twentieth century churches, Peter Walters reports on St Barbara’s Church on Rochester Road in Earlsdon which the Coventry Society visited on 29th May 2024.
From the street, St Barbara’s presents an unassuming face to the world. It’s encased in a homely red brick, it doesn’t have any real height to it and its blank west wall shows clearly that the money ran out and it was never finished.
Yet its very ordinariness masks an interior that compared to most places of worship in Coventry is characterful and unusual, even eccentric.
Take the name. There are only two churches in England dedicated to St Barbara, the patron saint of armourers, military engineers and miners, and nobody is quite sure why the name was thought appropriate for Earlsdon’s only Anglican church.
The current building, erected in 1930 to replace the original 1913 St Barbara’s in nearby Palmerston Road, has an entrance framed by two stone pillars, placed there as symbols of freemasonry. Why that should be so, nobody is really sure, although our well-informed and drily humorous guide Ian Leitch wonders if it might be because two of the senior clergy involved in the creation of the new church eighty-five years ago were themselves freemasons.
Then there’s the pulpit, a slightly forbidding, oversized dark wood edifice that teeters on a wine-glass base. Somewhere on it is the date 1661, although experts from the V&A have recently suggested it might be a little earlier.
It has no connection to Earlsdon or its parish church at all, but was donated to St Barbara’s by someone who’d picked it up at a London auction. Nobody’s quite sure why he thought it might fit St Barbara’s.
There’s no doubt, however, about the church’s architectural masterpiece, a gorgeous Lady Chapel in pale stone and richly carved Austrian oak, commissioned by machine tool tycoon Alfred Herbert in memory of his second wife Florence, who died in 1930. She had been a hospital matron and a fervent supporter of votes for women a generation earlier and to commemorate that, two lovely carvings of Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc flank the entrance to her memorial chapel.
Add in some fine modern stained glass and a wonderful frieze depicting the seasons by Coventry-born sculptor Walter Ritchie and St Barbara’s is truly a little gem, even though it doesn’t appear to shout about it much.
