St Vincent's Church, Sheffield

St Vincent’s Church is a disused (since 1998) Roman Catholic church situated on Solly Street at its junction with Hollis Croft in the centre of the City of Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

As a result of the Irish Potato Famine between the years of 1845 and 1849 many emigrants left Ireland to try to find a better life in England. The developing cutlery and tool industries of Sheffield attracted many of these Irish emigrants and they settled in "The Crofts" area of the town. The Crofts was centred on Solly Street (then called Pea Croft) and at that time was the centre of the Sheffield steel, cutlery and filemaking industries. It was an area of working class tenements and back to back housing interspersed with iron and steel works and small workshops making cutlery and hand tools.

The majority of the Irish emigrants in The Crofts were Roman Catholics and worshipped at the newly opened St Marie’s church in Norfolk Row, the only Catholic church in Sheffield in the early 1850s. Father Edmund Scully of St Marie’s pledged to build a school-chapel for The Crofts area and on Good Friday 1851 a plot of ground was purchased in the area for £700. Matthew Ellison Hadfield designed the chapel-school which was completed in July 1853 at a cost of £1,850.

The chapel was greatly expanded in 1856 by George Goldie, a partner of Hadfield’s, with the addition of a nave and a chancel at a cost of £3,100 and was officially recognised as a church although it had no tower or spire. Further building work costing £650 took place in 1870 when a church tower was built up to a height of 40 feet which incorporated the south porch and an entrance from White Croft. The tower was raised up to its present-day height of 93 feet in 1911 when a donation of £1,400 by Mr. Philip Wake enabled it to be completed in a design in the Norman style based on a typical church in Normandy. The architect of the new tower was Charles Hadfield and it was formally blessed and opened by Michael Logue Primate of All Ireland on 28 October 1911.

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