St James Church, Toowoomba, Anglican church in Toowoomba, Australia.
St James Church is a Gothic Revival brick church at the corner of Mort and Russell Streets in Toowoomba, built in 1869 to a design by Brisbane architect Richard George Suter. Its polychrome striped brickwork, steeply pitched roofs, small ornate roof towers and pointed arched openings follow the pattern of small English parish churches. The 1882 extension by James Marks gave the Mort Street end a gabled face with a tripartite lancet window, the Davenport window.
Construction started in 1869 under architect Richard George Suter on land donated by James Taylor at the intersection of Mort and Russell Streets. The building underwent major structural updates in the 1890s, including a new iron roof to replace the original slate covering.
The church is named after St James the Less, not St Luke, marking it as a separate foundation from Toowoomba's earlier Anglican church. Parishioners who opposed moving the site kept services going at the old St Luke's, and the dispute lasted about 30 years until the two became separate parishes divided by Margaret Street.
St James Church stands at the corner of Mort and Russell Streets, south of the Margaret Street line that once divided Toowoomba's Anglican parishes. The 1912 parish hall faces it across Russell Street and is separately heritage-listed. The church was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 28 July 2000.
The foundation stone was laid on 1 May 1869 by Queensland Governor Samuel Wensley Blackall, and the church opened on 23 December 1869 under Bishop Edward Tufnell. The building was named after St James the Less, not St Luke, which is why it became a separate parish from the earlier St Luke's church.
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