Wolverhampton's Locally Listed Buildings

Beckminster Methodist Church

Birches Barn Road


Listing: Locally listed, approved November 2001. Substantial Methodist church on prominent corner site.  Dated 1926.  Landmark building/architectural and historic interest.

Blue Plaque:  commemorates the Revd. Brian O'Gorman who was President of the Methodist Conference in 1969.

Comment:  Built at the time this area of suburbia was developing rapidly and now surrounded almost entirely by housing of the time.

Dr. John Thomas writes: 

"It is a late work of Joseph Crouch. 

Crouch & Butler were fine turn-of-the-century architects in Birmingham and produced Methodist churches, houses and books.  Churches, Mission Halls and Schools for Nonconformists ( 1901, published by Buckler & Webb, Birmingham) is their best known book, though Crouch's The Planning and Designing of a Methodist Church (1930, Silk & Terry, Birmingham) contains a plan of Beckminster.  Crouch also produced Puritanism and Art: an Inquiry into a Popular Fallacy (1910, Cassell, London).  Crouch & Butler wrote "The Apartments of the House: their Arrangement, Furnishing and Decoration" in 1900.

My guess is that Crouch was the church man in the practice and that Butler had gone by the time of Beckminster. 

The plan in Crouch's book shows a manse on the opposite side of the site to the church but it seems that this was never built."