History

St Salvador’s church was founded with a school in the Hilltown area of Dundee in 1856 by Bishop Alexander Penrose Forbes and the Reverend James Nicolson, later Dean of Brechin. Its mission was to the many mill workers who lived in the tenements in the area.

G F Bodley was commissioned to design the halls and church, and worship started in the upper part of the building to the south designed as the school. The nave of the church followed in 1868 and the chancel in 1874. The whole building was consecrated on Holy Cross day in that year.

George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907) was the brother-in-law (and first pupil) of Sir George Gilbert Scott who designed Dundee’s Episcopal cathedral and the Albert Institute (now McManus Galleries). One of his assistants was Ninian Comper, architect of the cathedral in Aberdeen.

Bodley made a special contribution to the architecture of Victorian Britain. He studied mediaeval churches with such understanding, and built new ones with such inspired discipline that in them the gothic style can truly be said to live again. Like many Victorian architects, he concerned himself with the whole design and furnishing of a church. But more than any other, he appreciated the mediaeval use of applied colour, a tradition which had been lost in Britain until it was revived in the Roman Catholic churches of A W N Pugin earlier in the nineteenth century.

The structure of Bodley’s churches stands clear and firm, but in many of them the whole surface of walls and ceilings (and sometimes the roof timbers and moulded stonework) are dissolved in a veil of stencilled pattern, each design having its source in a mediaeval example.

St Salvador’s, commissioned at an early stage in Bodley’s long career, shows the beginning of interest in a simple English gothic style, an ideal basis for coloured decoration.

Its design is a progress from west to east, starting with the low sloping roof of the porch. Then comes the nave, tall and quite narrow, with the rich green of the lower part and the deep biscuit colour of the buttressed aisles graduated up into the lighter tones of the upper walls and roof, where massive timbers are bevelled with red.

A more sumptuous red is the basis of the chancel arch which leads onwards and upwards into a space completely dominated by colour, having its climax in the high altar and figure-painted reredos. (This and much of the stained glass are the work of the London firm of Burlison and Grylls).

Through the arcade to the south of the chancel is the Lady chapel, whose own splendid treatment is pitched somewhere between that of the nave and the chancel.