Patrick Comerford
In recent days, I have been writing about a number of landmarks in east Oxford that I have noticed on my bus journeys to and from hospital appointments, and that I have returned to see time and again in recent months.
They include churches and pubs and one fountain on a roundabout: Saint Clement’s Church, the former Saint Ignatius Chapel, the Port Mahon, the Oranges and Lemons, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Victoria Fountain.
A charming and attractive on St Clement’s High Street dates from the late 1880s and early 1890s, and was built as a mission hall, parish buildings and a coffee shop. The building is on the corner of St Clement’s and Boulter Street, on the site of the old Cutler Boulter almshouses, which had moved to a new street leading from Worcester Street to Gloucester Green.
The curate of Saint Clements, the Revd WL Guerrier, obtained the site for the mission hall and funded the cost of the project. He wanted to provide public coffee and refreshment rooms on the ground floor, and rooms for reading, games and club meetings on the upper floors.
The first portion of the Mission Hall, consisting of the club house, was built ca 1886. The Saint Clement’s parish buildings opened in 1891, with a girls’ school upstairs. The buildings were designed by the Victorian and Edwardian Oxford architect Harry Wilkinson Moore (1850-1915). He was a son of Arthur Moore (1814-1873) and Mary Wilkinson (1821-1904), and a nephew of the architects George Wilkinson and William Wilkinson.
Moore trained as a pupil of his uncle William Wilkinson and as an assistant to Alfred Waterhouse. He went on to design a number of notable buildings in Oxford, including the covered bridge over Logic Lane at University College, Oxford, and works for Somerville College.
It is said Moore originally designed a more picturesque building, but these plans were modified or abandoned and the Tudor-Gothic inspired building was built by a local contactor, H Walker, who lived in the parish at Pembroke Street, now Rectory Road.
The Victoria Café was in the ground floor shop area on the right from the 1880s and also offered ‘well aired beds, good and reasonable accommodation, for cyclists and commercials, boarders taken.’ Walter James Hazell (1873-1938) and his wife Emma were the proprietors of the Victoria Café for 33 years, and for 26 years he was also the sexton of Saint Clement’s Church.
The café closed after Walter Hazell died in 1938. The former coffee shop became a Gospel Book Depot in 1949, and was the Saint Andrew’s Christian Book Centre until it closed in 2020. It is a coffee shop once again, known as the Living Room.
The parish buildings on the left, which opened in 1891, was planned for parish use, with a mission hall or public room, a girls’ school, a parish clubhouse, and a reading room. The Rector, the Revd F Pilcher was said to have ‘devoted much time and energy in trying to establish this useful work’. It designed to hold 200 people, and opened on 29 December 1891.
At the opening, the Revd WJ Guerrier prayed that ‘the parish might be known as a parish from which drunkenness and evil were driven out, and where the Gospel was known’.
The basement was planned for use for a variety of classes, from carving classes to Sunday Bible classes. The ground floor was the parish room, with entrances on both St Clement’s High Street and Boulter Street. The first floor, with access from Boulter Street, was reached by a stone staircase, and was the girls’ school and class room. The ceiling was relieved with arches and wood work part of the way up to the roof.
In the 1980s the upper floors of the Old Mission Hall were converted for use as sheltered accommodation, and the basement became a youth centre.
This is a two-storey Grade II listed building, built in red brick with stone dressings and a hall gable end facing onto the street. The doorway on the ground floor flanked by a three-light window on either side, and they are are joined by a five-light window across the top of the door. Above are three arches, each with a three-light window and there is a red tile roof.
The house next door is two storeys with an attic. There are casement windows on the first floor, and a dormer above, and a two-storey tile hung attic gable on the Boulter Street side of the building.
Today, Saint Clement’s Community Property owns and maintains a small number of properties in the parish, including the Old Mission Hall and the café on the street corner on St Clement’s.
