St Margaret, Ilkley

St Margaret’s is a Grade II* Free Perpendicular parish church on Queen’s Road, Ilkley, designed by Richard Norman Shaw and consecrated on 10 September 1879. It stands on the hillside towards Ilkley Moor in the Diocese of Leeds.

Overview

Historic England records a church of 1878–79 built to serve visitors to Ilkley’s hydropathic hotels. Shaw used the falling ground on the north and east to give the building a monumental character: an aisled four-bay nave with a storeyed north-west porch, a gabled bellcote between nave and chancel, and a tall chancel with north chapel and south organ chamber over vestries. The fabric is snecked dressed sandstone with freestone dressings and lead roofs. A tin church of 1874 in the Riddings served until the stone church was finished. Shaw later designed fittings including the pulpit (1881) and the Creation and Revelation windows by Powell & Sons (1897); the design also secured his full membership of the Royal Academy.

The wide interior has Decorated-character arcades and an extensive late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ensemble: screens by James Elwell of Beverley, a 1925 reredos by J. Harold Gibbons, and glass by Clayton & Bell, Morris & Co, Shrigley & Hunt and Martin Travers. A parish room was added in the early twenty-first century. The church remains the parish church of Ilkley St Margaret.

Further Information

• Historic England list entry 1200770
• St Margaret’s, Ilkley