St Mary's Church - Menai Bridge - A Victorian Church with a fresh -Modern- Feel

St Mary's Church sits on a rocky knoll overlooking the town of Menai Bridge. It is near to 53°13′24″N , 004°09′56″W, OS grid SH 555 717, What three words //dragonfly.strapping.snuggled. The postal code is LL59 5EA.

Above the junction with Telford Road, St Mary’s (Eglwys y Santes Fair) is the principal Victorian parish church serving modern Menai Bridge.

The present building was designed and Decorated in the Gothic manner by the Bangor-based architect Henry Kennedy and completed for the parish in the mid-19th century (generally recorded as 1858). It was erected to replace the tiny medieval island church of St Tysilio (Church Island) because the town’s expanding congregation outgrew that older building.

The stone church is built of random rubble with sandstone dressings, has a prominent west tower, a slated roof and is protected as a Grade II listed structure.

The mainland site was supplied at the request of the parish and local leaders: records note that the Marquess of Anglesey granted the site and that the rector of the time, Rev. T. Jones Williams, pushed for a mainland location rather than rebuilding on Church Island. The project was modest in scale by Victorian standards — contemporary accounts give the final cost at about £1,450 — with R. Parry named as builder in local sources.

After construction, the church acquired several notable Victorian fittings: stained glass by Mayer (installed 1869) and by Shrigley & Hunt (about 1876), a three-bay granite reredos added in 1885, and an octagonal granite font dated to about 1900.

St Mary’s became the town’s main parish church as Menai Bridge grew following the opening of Thomas Telford’s suspension bridge in the early 19th century. Traditionalists had wanted worship to remain on Church Island (St Tysilio), whose medieval cell and church are of much greater antiquity — a foundation there is attributed to St Tysilio in the 6th–7th century — but practical considerations of space and access led to the new, larger parish church on Mona Road.
The Thomas Telford Centre and local heritage groups record this nineteenth-century re-centring of worship onto the mainland as an important moment in the town’s modern development.


References;
Wikipedia
National Churches Trust
Coflein
Thank you to Google Earth for the zoom in map.

00:00 - Introduction
01:03 - Map
01:14 - Main video