Historic England: Churches top the list

A parish church on Teesside has been listed for the first time and two other churches have had their listing upgraded from Grade II to I following a joint project between Historic England and Middles­brough Diocese.

The church of St Mary and St Romuald, Yarm, receives a Grade II listing. It is a relatively early and little altered church by the celebrated nineteenth-century Catholic architect George Goldie.

The review also approved the regrading of the Abbey Church at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire, and St Charles Borromeo, in Hull, to the highest Grade I. The church of St Peter and St Paul, Leyburn, was also regraded to Grade II*. Mgr Canon David Hogan, chairman of Middlesbrough Diocese’s Historic Churches Committee, said the listing “highlights for the wider community that the Catholic Church has some real treasures in this part of the world.”

Eric Branse-Instone, listing adviser at Historic England, said: “Yorkshire has a wonderfully rich and varied Roman Catholic heritage ranging from the no-nonsense Dales respectability of St Peter and St Paul; through to the astonishingly dramatic, almost operatic interior of St Borromeo, and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Ampleforth Abbey Church, sublimely crafted and only completed in 1961.”