The unusual history of the Sallins "tin-and-timber" church celebrating 100 years

“A long-felt want supplied” ran the headline of the Leinster Leader on the first Saturday of October 1924 as the paper previewed the ceremonial opening of the new church in Sallins the following day.

But the Sallins church was no standard edifice of brick-and-stone. Instead, it had arrived months previously in a packaged format similar to an “Ikea” flat-pack of today.

It was a carefully dimensioned kit of corrugated metal for the exterior and of finished wood planks for the interior manufactured by the firm of Harrison and Company in south London.

Not alone did the building-kit arrive ready for erection but it was accompanied by a crew of tradesmen from the firm. And one of those Londoners, Edward Laxton, found love in the canal-side village where he settled and raised a family whose distinctive
surname continues in the locality.

Today the Sallins church is near-unique in its architectural style – only another Catholic church in the hills of south Tipperary holds the same status of a church made entirely of tin and still open for daily prayer more than a hundred years later.

But how did Sallins acquire this gem of pastoral architecture – and why tin? In the early 1900s mass-goers in Sallins petitioned the parish priest Very Rev. Fr. Norris for a church to save them the journey to the parish church in Naas. Plans were drafted and a committee of local merchants – Healy and Flanagan prominent among them – began to raise money.

However, the outbreak of the first world war put paid to fund-raising; by 1920 money was scarce but the need for a chapel remained. Fr Norris, although advanced in age, was alternative in his thinking, and decided to meet his parishioners’ request in a practical way by ordering a ‘tin’ church from the firm of Harrison & Co in south London.

Although unusual in Ireland such kit-built churches were common throughout Britain and its colonies. They were deployed by all creeds wherever the pastoral service of a new population needed a rapidly built church. Examples were situated in mission
stations, frontier towns, mining camps and military outposts. Nor was the pre-fabricated style confined to churches – minus the crucifixes at each gable, similar buildings of corrugated zinc panels were functioned as parish halls, cricket pavilions,
hospital wards and residential dwellings.

The assembly of the Sallins church was completed by the spring of 1924 and the following months were occupied with internal furnishing. The altar made of pitch pine was the gift of a Miss Condron of Eadestown. The external bell which predates the
church by sixty years also came from the Eadestown direction, the gift of its parish priest V Rev Fr Lockhart, PP. Closer to home Mrs B. Hourihane, of Sallins national school, donated paintings of St Patrick and St Brigid while the Boushell family gifted the churches’ only stained-glass window which forms a backdrop to the altar.

Farmers in the Sallins area lent their horses and carts to the building contractors. A Mrs Reddy of an old Sallins family was recorded as being generous in her support.

Additional internal carpentry was the work of Mr D. Smyth, local woodworker, and Denis Corcoran of the renowned Naas builders erected the bell on its external gantry.

And so a day long anticipated by the Sallins faithful arrived and on 5 October 1924, Fr Norris, PP, solemnly blessed the new chapel having received authorisation from Bishop Foley of Kildare & Leighlin, who had been invited but was indisposed. In the
inaugural homily Fr Norris congratulated his parishioners on achieving a church of their own and one dedicated to Our Lady & the Guardian Angels.

While other tin churches were later to appear in the expanding suburbs of Dublin city all were short-lived and have been replaced by block-built structures. But the Sallins church retains its distinctive mission-chapel profile, its pristine tin fabric bearing witness to its place in the hearts and minds of its congregations over a century and counting.