In 1876 the trustees of a Free Church congregation in Stornoway paid 250 pounds for a corner lot at the intersection of Francis Street and Kenneth Street. The land was good. The site was central. The plan was to build something worthy of a growing congregation in a town that was, in the late Victorian decades, expanding more than at any other time in its history. They commissioned a Glasgow architect called Robert Alexander Bryden to design the church and shipped in red Torridon Sandstone for the walls. They laid the foundation stone in August 1877. Just over a year later, on Friday 18 October 1878, the doors opened for worship. The spire that gives the church its silhouette today did not arrive for another generation.
Torridon Sandstone is one of the most distinctive building stones in the western Highlands: a deep dark red, almost purple in some lights, quarried from the Torridon mountains on the mainland coast across the Minch. Shipping it to Stornoway was no small undertaking. The contrast with the local Lewisian gneiss, which is grey-black and dauntingly hard to work, was deliberate; the trustees wanted something that read as warm and architectural rather than as a piece of the moor. Bryden dressed the building with white stone for the window surrounds and the door, sharpening the lines of the red walls. The masonry, plumbing, and painting were carried out by local Stornoway tradesmen. The joinery came from John Baxter of Glasgow, the plasterwork from A.W. Paterson of Dunoon, the glazier work from C and J Malloch of Glasgow. The architect himself donated the baptismal font.
For thirty-three years the church stood without a spire. In February 1911 one was added at a cost of 1,189 pounds to designs by another architect, Alex Macdonald, and the building took on the silhouette that visitors recognise today. Two years later, in 1913, the congregation absorbed the congregation of the James Street United Presbyterian Church when the two bodies united; the James Street building and its manse were sold and the proceeds came to this church, which was renamed the United Free English Church. In 1929 the congregation voted unanimously for another change of name. From then on the church was Martin's Memorial Church. The name reportedly honoured the Reverend John Martin, who had been a long-serving minister of the original congregation. The organ inside is a Harrison Pipe Organ purchased in 1949 at a cost of 2,600 pounds and opened on 20 November of that year. It remains the instrument that fills the church on Sunday mornings.
Stornoway has more churches per head of population than almost any town its size in Britain, a reflection of the central role of Presbyterian worship in Lewis life and of the historic divisions within Scottish Presbyterianism that produced separate Free, Established, and United Free congregations. Martin's Memorial Church has stood through several of those divisions and re-unifications, through both world wars, through the Iolaire disaster which took men from the congregations of every church in town, and through a century of slow change in how Stornoway dresses on a Sunday morning. The red sandstone is weathering well. The spire is still a landmark. Walking up Francis Street toward Kenneth Street, the church appears at the corner exactly as Bryden intended in 1877, plus the additional grace of the spire he never lived to add.
Martin's Memorial Church stands at 58.21 degrees north, 6.39 degrees west, at the corner of Francis Street and Kenneth Street in central Stornoway. From the air the spire is one of the most recognisable features of the town skyline, particularly when seen against the harbour and Lews Castle on the opposite side of the bay. Stornoway Airport (EGPO) is about a mile and a half east. The church is best identified by its red-sandstone walls, which contrast with the lighter render of most surrounding buildings, and by its central spire visible from approaches over Lewis Hill.