South Hetton Road, St Mary RC Church

The church was built in 1923 to serve the ‘thriving and virile Catholic population’ (Northern Catholic Calendar, 1936) of this poor mining district.

The church is a simple rectangular structure with walls of brick, faced with render and a pitched roof covered with artificial slate. Attached to the main church building is a flat roofed porch/vestibule across the west front and a flat-roofed sacristy at the east end of the north side. The side walls have rectangular opening with upvc windows. The interior is a single undivided space with a glazed lobby at the west end. The walls are plastered, the windows clear-glazed. The original timber open roof structure was ceiled with boarding some twenty years ago (information from Fr O’Gorman).