Fairfield Primary School Penarth - Religious Sites

Religious Sites

Local church sites are:

• St Augustine's Church is just off Church Place on Penarth Headland. The Penarth parish church of Saint Augustine stands on the headland site of a much earlier church probably dating from 1240. The original church was demolished in 1865 and the new much larger church built in 1866 at a cost of £10,000, financed by the Countess of Plymouth. It was designed by the famous Victorian architect William Butterfield and it is described as one of his best polychromatic churches. The interior uses a mixture of coloured bricks and stone in yellow, pink, red, black and white. Because the distinctive tower of the old church it had appeared on navigational charts. At the request of the Admiralty a similar saddle-back tower was kept in the new design. The new tower was 90 feet high, much larger than the old church. St Augustine's is a Grade I listed building. The churchyard cross is medieval and dates from the original church, but is much weathered and most of the detailed decoration has vanished.

• St Peter's Church also known as Old Cogan Church Church in Wales is located off Sully Road and may have originally been a wooden structure built as early as 800. "The present structure is one of the earliest ecclesiastical buildings surviving in the Vale of Glamorgan and the Diocese of Llandaff. There is a reference to it in 1180 so it was probably constructed just before that of thin lias limestone slabs, a local stone, in a herringbone pattern more typical of earlier Saxon times."

• All Saints Church in Wales is located in Victoria Square. Built by the Earl of Plymouth in 1892, on a greenfield site previously used as the town's cricket and rugby field and donated by wealthy Penarth butcher David Cornwall, the church is now surrounded by a square of later housing although the original grassed area has been retained and landscaped with trees. Destroyed by a German air raid in 1943, the church was rebuilt and reopened in 1955.

• St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church is on Wordsworth Avenue. The church relocated from an earlier premises in the triangle opposite the old Royal Hotel, where Arcot Street meets Queens Road. The original church and school was built by Bishop Hedley in 1873.

• Trinity Methodist Church is in Woodland Place. The present church, built 1901 in a Gothic style, has the only spire left in the town and was designed by Henry Budgen. The congregation had met since 1890 in a corrugated iron building on the site known as 'Playter's Church' built in the 1880s. In 1896 a schoolroom had been built alongside the iron church. Trinity was damaged several times by bombing during World War II, and its stained glass windows were removed for safe keeping to the Coed Ely Coal Pit, Gilfach Goch. In 1970 a day centre for the elderly was established and in 1986 a radical remodelling of the original school accommodation provided meeting rooms, a thriving youth club, kitchens and toilets.

• Immanuel Church Penarth (ICP) meets in the Upper Hall of Trinity Methodist Church in Woodland Place and was established in 2002.

• Albert Road Methodist Church is at Albert Road and Albert Crescent.
• Tabernacle Baptist Chapel is in Plassey Street
• Hebron Church is on Pill Street, Cogan
• The United Reformed Church is on Elfed Avenue
• The Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall is on Plassey Street.