St John the Baptist's, Westwood Heath

Pevsner is enthusiastic about this church built by the partnership in 1842. Westwood Heath was a hamlet three miles south-west of the centre of Coventry. It is built from the local red stone and consists of a nave, chancel and a north porch with a brick bellcote over the west gable. Pevsner states that it is ‘one of the first archaeologically conscientious churches in England … an attempt at least at recreating the local village church … the attitude is unmistakably the Victorian as against the pre-Victorian’. Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh, who was a scholarly poet and a member of Christ Church, Oxford, provided the site, the endowment and the stone from his nearby quarry. It was designed for 300 people, with two-thirds of the sittings being free and was completed by 1845, although a vestry was later added in 1876.

Pevsner, N. and Sherwood, J., Oxfordshire, Buildings of England (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 469-70.
Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XXXII, p. 429.
Cole, D., The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott (The Architectural Press, London, 1980), p. 24.