Gateway Church Wirral

Gateway Church Wirral stands in Birkenhead on Woodchurch Road, a former Congregational church built between 1857 and 1858 to designs by William Cole. The building cost over £5,000 to erect and another £2,500 was spent in the 1880s to improve it. Frederick Smeeton Williams served as its first minister after opening. A serious fire in 1992 damaged the interior, yet restoration work followed. By 2008 the building had been revived once more, this time as the Wirral Christian Centre. The church is constructed from rubble stone with Westmorland slate roofs and a six-bay nave. A square tower on the north side has clasping buttresses and paired bell openings in its top stage. The west front shows a moulded arch below a decorative hood mould and a seven-light window above. Inside, the wide short auditorium sits over a basement, lit by three-light windows with Decorated tracery. Visitors find a Grade II listed interior of simple stonework and clear glass. The nave’s buttresses divide each bay, while a rose window and a canted baptistry mark the east and west ends. The battlemented parapet of the tower and its reduced pinnacles add a modest skyline to Woodchurch Road.