Oxford Mission Epiphany Church

A very large brick church in the Bengal delta, built from a sketch by a woman with no architectural training, and one of the largest churches in Asia. Edith Langridge came to Barishal in 1902 to found the Sisterhood of the Epiphany; the Epiphany Church was raised from her drawing and inaugurated on 26 January 1903, with Father E. L. Strong overseeing the design’s completion and a second building phase finished in 1907. The two are named together as its architects. The building is a plain, powerful exercise in load-bearing brick: a long nave with a clerestory, a semi-domed apse, low segmental roofs, and an ornamental register limited to pilaster strips and a corbelled arcade of small arches under the eaves. It stands in a walled compound of about thirty-five acres among rows of palms, and it is painted a red so saturated that the building is known locally simply as the red church.