Shedkm has designed a new church for the Parish of Heswall in Merseyside, allowing the congregation to better serve its community and benefit from a contemporary street presence.
Photos
Daniel Hopkinson Photography
Located on the Wirral, and closer to the River Dee than the Mersey, the Lighthouse Church can be found on Telegraph Road in the heart of Heswall.
Sat between a kebab-pizza shop and a micro-brewery pub, this is, in fact, the site of the previous church – the Church of the Good Shepherd – and Parish Hall, both of which were demolished in November 2021 to make way for their replacement. Though only built in the 1960s, the original church was suffering from a number of expensive structural problems, while the older Parish Hall was also falling into disrepair and becoming less suitable for the church’s programming needs.
The new Lighthouse Church is defined by an extensively glazed façade, part of an attempt to improve the church’s street presence, being a more visually porous than its predecessor and alluding to the church’s wide range of outreach and community events that take place inside, including concerts, exhibitions, playgroups, youth activities, classes, counselling, advice and community support services.
Beyond the façade, the building extends as a single, pitched volume and occupying the whole plot, eventually backing onto the road behind (Pye Road). The building’s form is intentionally simplistic, geared to be easily adaptable and able to accommodate the broad range of activities carried out by the Church.
Worship takes place at the heart of the building, with the large, open volume being naturally lit by clerestory glazing. On either side of this space, the front and rear of the building, are hospitality and community areas, with these spaces being delineated by objects containing flexible meeting spaces that can be opened up if necessary to extend either area, or indeed the main central space.
In turn, these smaller spaces serve as thresholds to the main place of worship at the centre of the building, allowing the Telegraph Road-facing façade to broadcast, as shedkm describes, a “contemporary ecclesiastical identity.”
The essence of the proposal, says shedkm, is to ‘de-cellularise’ a conventional layout of church rooms served by corridors and provide a more flexible and efficient ‘without walls’ arrangement of spaces that flow seamlessly within and provide flexibility to host a diverse range of different activities and groups.
“At the heart of our design approach was an emphasis on embracing the church’s established ethos of welcome and hospitality but making this much more visible,” said Darren Jones, associate director at shedkm. “The name and branding of Lighthouse Church, conceived by shedkm, reflect the church’s ethos and the idea of the building as a physical and metaphorical beacon in the community, highlighted by the glowing outward-facing elevations that contrast with the previous impermeable walls.”
Credits
Client
Heswall Parish
Architect
shedkm
Structural engineer
Thomasons
Mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineer
Crookes Walker Consulting
Quantity Surveyor
Modero
Project Manager
PMC2
Contractor
Skyline
Additional images
Source: Architecture Today
