St Thomas' Church is a church of the Church of Ireland in south Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is located at the end of Eglantine Avenue at the junction with the Lisburn Road and holds regular services. The parish extends from Elmwood Avenue to Adelaide Park, and from the Malone Road to the Lisburn Road. History The part of Belfast south of Queen's University between the Malone and Lisburn roads, known as the 'Malone Ridge', underwent rapid expansion from the middle of the 19th century, as a prosperous and fashionable suburb of large detached villas and grand terraces. At the time, the Church of Ireland presence in this area was limited to the old Malone Church, as well as Christ Church in College Square, neither of which was deemed an appropriate place of worship. Following a generous bequest by Andrew Thomas McClean for the endowment and construction of a new parish church, the architect John Lanyon of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon was appointed in 1866. Building work, by Messrs. Lowry and Son, commenced in 1869 and St Thomas's was consecrated on 22 December 1870. Architecture St Thomas' Church was designed by architect John Lanyon, and completed in 1870. In the same year, Lanyon's firm completed Belfast Castle. Other notable examples of their then recent work in the city included Clarence Place in May Street (now occupied by Lambert Smith Hampton), Moore and Weinberg's warehouse in present-day Donegall Square North (now housing the Linen Hall Library) and the main building at Queen's University (now called the Lanyon Building). St Thomas's is one of the grandest and most fully finished examples of High Victorian Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, not only in Belfast, but in Ulster. Built of white Scrabo sandstone with finely dressed masonry round doors and windows, it is adorned with red sandstone banding and coloured marble discs and colonnettes to the tower and spire. The exterior is a confident exercise in eclectic design: generally the style is Early French Gothic, but the polychrome effects point to an Italian Gothic influence. There may also be an Early Christian Irish reference in the round stone-capped stair turret. The date 1870 is inscribed over the north doorway. Probably because of constraints imposed by the sloping site, the orientation of St Thomas' is unusual, the chancel facing north. In 1888 the church was enlarged at the south end, to a John Lanyon design, when the southwest