1851 – St. Francis Xavier Church, Berrima, New South Wales

Architect: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This is Pugin’s only intact and essentially unaltered building in Australia. In its layout and permanent liturgical furnishings””piscina, sedilia, Easter sepulchre recess, provision for a Doom painting (the designed rood screen appears not to have been erected)””it is a comprehensive expression of his ideal for the revival of a small English medieval village church. It is one of only two such intact churches of Pugin’s with this typology and these furnishings worldwide, the other being Our Lady & St Wilfrid’s, Warwick Bridge, Cumbria. It is the only Australian church with an Easter sepulchre recess and provision for a Doom painting.

Designed in 1842 in an Early English Gothic idiom of around the mid thirteenth century, the church consists of: a four-bay nave, buttressed at the corners, with north porch and a single bellcote astride the west gable; a two-bay chancel with diagonal buttressing to its east wall; and a sacristy abutting the chancel south wall. It is constructed of ashlar sandstone and has corrugated iron roofs. The nave and porch interiors are of ashlar sandstone, the chancel and sacristy being plastered. The nave has an open timber roof with arch-braced collar tie trusses having arch-braced king posts.