St James
Tebay Cumbria

St James Church, Tebay, is a small congregation worshipping in the "Railway Church" - built in 1880 when the railway, and the folk who worked on it, was a very significant part of life in Tebay.

St James works closely with the Methodist church in Tebay, as well as its sister churches in Orton and Ravenstonedale.

 

In adjacent carpark (shared with Tebay club)  

This church was built as recently as 1880 and owes its existence solely to the coming of the railway.

Tebay’s first connection to the railways was in 1846 when the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway was opened. In 1861 it became the junction of the L&CR with the new cross-Pennine South Durham & Lancashire Union Railway from Darlington. Both railways had locomotive depots here. All of this This led to an influx of railway workers - who occupied 5 rows of purpose-built houses - and to the building of the church where previously the villagers had had to look to nearby Orton for their spiritual sustenance.

The Lancaster & Carlisle Railway is now part of the West Coast Main Line from London Euston to Glasgow and so the passenger trains still thunder through Tebay. The line from Darlington, however, was closed in 1962 as part of the Beeching Plan cuts. If you drive east along the A865 you can still some impressive railway viaducts sitting as mute monuments to the lost glories of the “Railway Age”. Tebay Station closed in 1968 and was demolished in the early 1970s.

The vicar at Orton, one E,Holme, found that the railway companies were legally unable to provide funds for the building of a church and parsonage in Tebay, so he appealed directly to the shareholders of what was then the London & North Western Railway. The directors made contributions. One was James Cropper MP who owned a paper mill at Burneside near Kendal. That company, still bearing his name, makes speciality papers to this day. The church was opened in 1880.

It was designed by C.J.Ferguson who was a pupil of the famous George Gilbert Scott who was responsible for many a (not necessarily sympathetic!) church restoration in Victorian England. To my eyes, its biggest peculiarity is its apsidal west end. From the time of the Romans apses had always housed the altar and therefore had been situated at the east end of a church. There is a little bell tower with a conical roof rather like something out of a fairy tale castle! Despite its apse, the church is not a neo-Norman structure. Rather, with its lancet windows, it harks back to the Early English period.

Internally this is an impressive building. Charmingly, the builders adopted the two-tone brick schema that was used on many of the L&NWR’s stations, including Manchester Piccadilly. It is simple in design - a nave and a chancel with an arch that spans virtually the entire church. The benches are of the same design as the L&NWR’s station benches of the time. Light floods in. It might not be ancient but it is an impressive and practical place of worship - although those benches look to be darned uncomfortable! Because the church is built on a slope there is a room below the apsidal part of the church and that is used now as a function room. The whole ambience is of a church that it is still very much at the hea

The old SD&LR line actually passed close by the western end of the church. This must have been a noisy and smoky church in its heyday. There were benefits though: the railway gasworks used to supply the gas lighting and hot water for heating was pumped up from the engine shed!

I don’t suppose I will persuade anyone to go far out of their way to visit this church but it really is worth a small detour if you are in the area if only to prove that the wealthy Victorians didn’t invariably have more money than good taste!

From: http://www.greatenglishchurches.co.uk/html/tebay.html