Durham Street Methodist Church

The Durham Street Methodist Church was a Gothic Revival church in the central city of Christchurch, New Zealand, opened on Christmas Day 1864. Methodists were a small but active congregation in a settlement that was mainly Anglican, and they sold their first chapel in High Street in 1864 to build anew. The design came from an architectural competition held in 1863, won by the Melbourne firm Crouch and Wilson, while the local architect Samuel Farr, who placed second, supervised the construction. It was built of Halswell and Port Hills basalt with Charteris Bay sandstone, which made it the first church in Canterbury built of permanent materials and the earliest stone church in the region. The interior followed the standard Victorian Methodist plan of a meeting hall surrounded by galleries, designed to hold 1200 people. The church was registered as a Category I historic place in 1985. It was severely damaged by the earthquake of 4 September 2010 and collapsed in the earthquake of 22 February 2011, killing three workers who were removing the organ, after which the ruins were destroyed. A replacement building opened on 29 March 2020.