Radford
St Michael

History

A church was proposed for this site as early as 1882 as part of the work of church extension underwritten by the Nottingham Spiritual Aid and Church Extension Society, and the willingness of the Rev. C Lea Wilson to see his parish of St Peter, Old Radford, divided up for Anglican purposes.

OS map from 1882 showing
cottages on the church site
© Crown Copyright and Database
Right 2015. Ordnance Survey
(Digimap Licence)

Sometime before 1884 the future site for the Church of St. Michael’s and All Angels was purchased by the head of the Player tobacco family who were building their new factory nearby. The site was then gifted to St. Peter’s Church Radford for future use for the erection of a church. The site was previously owned by St Peter’s as glebe land and a few cottages are shown fronting Alfreton Road on the 1882 Ordnance Survey map.

On 1 January 1884 a Mission Hall under the jurisdiction of St. Peter’s was opened, providing additional accommodation for the expanding population of Old Radford. The mission cost £1,700, towards which £1,300 was raised before the building opened. It was a sizeable building which continued to be well used when the new church was opened.

Original scheme
for the church

In early 1880 plans were drawn up by architects Habershaw and Fawkner of London and Newport, and in June 1884 the Duchess of Rutland laid the foundation stone. Due to problems with the structure of the soil on the site, additional time and costs were incurred which forced a review of the plans, resulting in the length of the nave being reduced, and the western end (temporarily closed with a brick wall) cutting the seating from 1,000 to 550, and the spire, which should have topped the tower, never being built. Ewan Christian, architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, reported in November 1889 that three bays of the nave with its north and south aisles, chancel with organ chamber and vestry on the south side with a heating chamber below, had been completed. It was, in his view, fit to become a parish church.

The planned peal of nine bells was reduced to a single bell, although another was added in 1937.

Despite these economies the work had to be finished cheaply. St. Michael’s was eventually consecrated in 1902. The opening ceremony was so well attended that a tent had to be erected outside the south porch to be used as a robing room.

The cost of the building had been in part met by a donation by St. Peter’s from the original purchase money paid by Mr Player, a £2,000 gift from the vicar of St Peter’s (which may have been the same donation), gifts from others totalling £4,800 and donations from the parishioners of £600. A further £839 was raised by a collection at the dedication ceremony. The church did not finally clear the original building debt until 1936, the same year that St Michael’s first vicarage was purchased. Since 1928, if not earlier, the vicar had lived on Noel Street.

The work progressed slowly until 1902, when the decision was made to complete only part of the church cheaply, omitting the spire, reducing the length of the nave and omitting the planned large narthex and porches at the west end. None of the omitted parts of the church were ever built.

By 1906 the church had utilised the land not used by the shortened nave, and was said to have a fine tennis court and bowling green available for the use of parishioners, who numbered about 6,000.

Until 1913 St. Michael’s was designated a chapel-of-ease to St. Peter’s; in this year it was separated, being designated a district in its own right, and the title Old Radford was changed simply to Radford.

The population of the parish increased steadily to 7,000 in 1949, but the need to pay for roof repairs in the same year created some difficulty. By the 1960s Nottingham City Council was working on plans to implement large scale clearance of a major area of the parish, replacing the terraced housing with multi-storey tower blocks. Congregation numbers were already falling and the departure of long-term residents added to the church’s problems. During the last few weeks of the church’s life, attendance at services was never more than about twenty people. The church was closed, and after standing boarded up for some time, was demolished in 1975.

The church’s Marriage and Baptism Registers can be found in Nottinghamshire Archives.