St. Mark the Evangelist Church of England Parish Hall - George Street, Fitzroy

            Facing out onto George Street, Fitzroy, the St. Mark the Evangelist Church of England Parish Hall and verger's cottage were added in 1889 to designs by architects Hyndman and Bates. 

The hall is arranged as a nave with clerestorey windows and side aisles with buttresses.  In 1891 the same architects designed a new George Street facade and porch to the parish hall.  At the same time they designed the Choir Vestry and Infants Sunday School on Hodgson Street, to replace the earlier school of 1849 which had been located in the forecourt of the church.

The parish hall is built of locally sourced red bricks from the nearby Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, where there was a large brickworks.  The 1891 frontage is graced with delicate Gothic tracery in stone, and whilst the windows may have been bricked up in subsequent years, the ornate stone window frames remain in-situ, so a present visitor may imagine what the building's original architectural design looked like.  The name of the hall still appears in finely executed Gothic font above the porch, although some of the letters have fallen away in the years since the parish hall's construction.  Adjunct to the main hall window are ornamental buttresses in keeping with the building's original ecclesiastical use, helping it to blend in with St. Mark the Evangelist Church of England next door.  

The vicarage along with  St. Mark the Evangelist Church of England itself and the Social Settlement Building also built for the local parish of Fitzroy, border the beautiful St. Mark's Green, a valuable green space in the built-up environs of Melbourne's very first suburb. 

St. Mark the Evangelist was the first church to be built outside of the original Melbourne grid as Fitzroy developed into the city's first suburb.  A working-class suburb, the majority of its residents were Church of England and from 1849 a Mission Church and school served as a centre for religious, educational and recreational facilities.  The school was one of a number of denominational schools established by the Church of England and was partly funded by the Denominational School Board.
St. Mark the Evangelist Church of England was designed by architect James Blackburn and built in Early English Gothic style.  Richard Grice, Victorian pastoralist and philanthropist, generously contributed almost all the cost of its construction.  Work commenced in 1853 to accommodate the growing Church of England congregation of Fitzroy.  On July 1st, 1853, the first stone of St. Mark the Evangelist was laid by the first Bishop of Melbourne, The Right Rev. Charles Perry.  Unfortunately, Blackburn did not live to see its completion, dying the following year in 1854 of typhoid.  This left St. Mark the Evangelist without an architect to oversee the project, and a series of other notable Melbourne architects helped finish the church including Lloyd Tayler, Leonard Terry and Charles Webb.  Even then when St. Mark the Evangelist opened its doors on Sunday, January 21st, 1855, the church was never fully completed with an east tower and spire never realised. The exterior of the church is very plain, constructed of largely unadorned bluestone, with simple buttresses marking structural bays and tall lancet windows.  The church's belfry is similarly unadorned, yet features beautiful masonry work.  It has a square tower and broach spire.

Taken in: Australia / Victoria / Melbourne / Collingwood North (show map)

Taken on: January 5, 2015

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Camera: Canon DIGITAL IXUS 80 IS, f/4.5, 1/400 sec, 14.3mm, ISO 80 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon DIGITAL IXUS 80 IS
Aperture:	f/4.5
Exposure Time:	0.003 sec (1/400)
Focal Length:	14.3mm
ISO:	80
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Auto, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
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