Listed Building record MDR12136 - Church of the Holy Trinity, Main Street, Shirebrook

The present building is on the site of an earlier chapel. Very little is known about the history of this chapel of Shirebrook. Lysons simply remarks: 'there is a chapel of ease at Shirebrook, at which divine service is performed once a month by the rector of Pleasley or his curate'. The building was kept in good repair through a tax levied on the inhabitants of the Township. Interestingly, the building was referred to as 'church' as often as it was 'chapel'. In 1754 the building underwent considerable repairs. The taxation roll of 1291 does not ascribe any chapel to Pleasley, nor is it mentioned in the 'Valor Ecclesiaticus' of Henry VIII. It is mentioned by the Parliamentary Commissioners of 1650: 'Shirbrook is a chapel of ease, in the parish of Plesley. The chapel is thought fitt to be disused and the village connected to Plesley. One William Thorpe officiates at Sherbrooke, who was formerly sequestred out of Carsington in the hundred of Wirksworth'. (1) This Parish church was built in 1844 by Patterson & Hind of Nottingham, at a cost of £1000. This part is now the south aisle. The nave and chancel were built in 1904; and the east wall was built in 1958. The church is built in Norman and Early English styles. It is built of coursed squared rock-faced sandstone and sandstone ashlar, and has Welsh slate roofs and stone coped gables with moulded kneelers. The porch of the old church has an inner round-arched doorway with roll moulding and one order of colonettes with volute capitals. Inside, the old church has a round-arched chancel arch of two chamfered orders. The two naves are divided by two broad double-chamfered pointed arches. Many of the chancel furnishings date from the 1960s by Frank Knight of Wellingborough. There is a brass eagle lectern dated 1904. A square neo-Norman font on a base of five shafts with colonettes in the cut-away angles of the bowl bares the inscription 'In Nomine/Patris/et filis/Spiritus Sancti'. There are also two stained glass windows of the early 1930s made by Abbott & Co. of Lancaster. There is a brass memorial tablet to Joseph Paget, who died 1896, by Benham & Froud of London; and there is another to Rev. John Cargill, who died 1876, by Cox & Sons of London. Royal Arms sit above the west arcade in cast metal, and were restored in 1966. (2)