The market town of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, which attracted increasing numbers of visitors to its hydros from the 1850s, quickly gained in size from the mid-1860s after the trustees of the Middelton [sic] estate began to release land for development and the Midland and North Eastern railways constructed a network of lines from Leeds and Bradford.
To supplement the limited capacity of the medieval All Saints’ parish church, a “tin church” was opened north of the town centre in 1874, offering a style of worship which caused a considerable sensation when the choir appeared in surplices to the wonderment of local worshippers. Apparently, the organising committee would have liked to introduce cassocks, but thought it would going a bit too far.
The project to replace the tin church with a suitable stone edifice brought the rising star of his generation of British architects, Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912) to the town.
The incoming population were characterised by the first vicar, Rev William Danks:
The majority of tourists are of the poorer sort, and cannot help us much. The richer ones are almost entirely Bradford Nonconformists.
Norman Shaw’s biographer, Andrew Saint, neatly pinpoints the clientele of the High Anglican St Margaret’s – “a stream of consumptive visitors attending the Hydro, coughing the coal dust out of their chests into the clear moorland air, and thanking their maker with alacrity that they were still alive to do so”.
The original 1874 estimate of £5,000 was swamped by a final expenditure of £15,000, as Shaw persuaded the trustees to increase the seating capacity from six hundred to a thousand worshippers
In the course of the building programme the intended low central tower was abandoned because of the “slippery, spongy sort of ground” which caused the nave piers to settle in early 1879, and a chancel, not included in the original budget, was added.
Shaw used the sloping site to tuck the heating chambers and vestries beneath the chancel, and created a sense of architectural balance by making the low-pitched nave and chancel roofs equal in height, and providing equivalent ten-light east and west windows with elaborate Perpendicular tracery.
St Margaret’s was consecrated by the Bishop of Ripon on September 10th 1879. Its choral communion was the first heard in the district.
Shaw was astute both in financial management and quality control. He respected William Morris as an artist but wouldn’t do business with him:
Morris is no good. His work is sometimes splendid (not always), but he is so full of cranks and general stubbornness that it is nearly impossible to do anything like what is called “business” with him. Being an advanced socialist he cannot do with much less than from 100% to 250% clear profit in his work, and so his work is dear!!!
The interior decoration was done by Shaw’s business associate, John Aldam Heaton (1828-97), a stuff merchant who became a professional designer, first of textiles and later of interiors and furniture. Formerly of Harden Grange, Bingley, he was a member of William Morris’ circle and a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted a portrait of Heaton’s wife, Ellen. In 1876 John Aldam Heaton installed himself in a studio above Richard Norman Shaw’s Bloomsbury office.
Richard Norman Shaw made further additions to the interior of St Margaret’s in the years following: his font of 1879 was given a canopy in 1911; he also designed the pulpit (1881) and the centre of the screen (1898-9).
He had reason to be grateful of his Ilkley commission: the design was his ticket of admission to full membership of the Royal Academy.
And the town of Ilkley is enhanced by the work of two nationally celebrated architects within a mile of each other – St Margaret’s Church by Norman Shaw and the villa Heathcote by Sir Edwin Lutyens.