page_title: Wesleyan Church, Aldershot
section_title: Design and features
hierarchical_section_title: Wesleyan Church, Aldershot / Design and features
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the Wesleyan Church in Aldershot, Hampshire with adjacent Soldiers' Home.
context_page_description: The Wesleyan Church is a former Methodist church for the town of Aldershot in Hampshire. Closed in 1988 the building has been a Grade II* listed building since 30 April 1981. In use today as offices, a dental studio and a gymnasium, the former Wesleyan Church is situated on the corner of Grosvenor Road and Queens Road in Aldershot.
context_section_description: Built to the design of William Willmer Pocock with local sandstone rubble dressed with Bath stone and partly built with brick at the rear with slate roofs and crested ridge tiles, the nave was built with aisles, transepts, a chancel with a tower at the north-west corner. The design is Gothic Revival enhanced with Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular features. The main west window is Early English in style. The organ was installed in 1906 while the choir stalls and lectern were fitted after the Methodist Union of 1932 when the building had to accommodate a larger congregation after the smaller Primitive Methodist Rotunda chapel on Victoria Road in the town closed and its congregation moved to the Wesleyan buildings on Grosvenor Road and Ash Road.
  The prominent tower, described as " the only significant tower in the town", is a local landmark and visible for miles. The tower clock was installed in 1922 in memory of the Rev. Edward Pearce Lowry (1843-1921), father of the  English physical chemist Thomas Martin Lowry and Honorary Chaplain to the Forces of Aldershot Command from 1892 to 1919. The Rev Lowry is buried in Aldershot Military Cemetery.
  The nave is supported by columns of cast iron capped with Bath stone. The preserved reredos behind the now removed altar was created in mosaic and tiles and showed the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer. The reredos is in memory of Frances Penelope Wharton Middleton, the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Watson who fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 as a Major in the 69th Regiment. She is further commemorated on a brass plaque dated 1882 placed at the bottom of the reredos by her husband Richard Wharton Middleton of Leasingham Hall in Leasingham in Lincolnshire; he had also fought at Waterloo as an Ensign.
caption: The Wesleyan Church and Soldiers' Home c1897
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