Church Heritage Record 610266

3-bay aisled nave, cedar shingled bell-turret at west end of the nave and south-west porch, 3-bay chancel.

Nave estimated to be c 15m (50ft) x 4.5m (15ft), chancel 8m long (26ft).

The church was built on a new site to a design by William Butterfield in 1850, at the same time as All Saints, Margaret Street in London, though obviously much more modest in scale and detail.  The church was built at the end of the incumbency of the Rev Henry (later Cardinal of Westminster) Manning who was Rector of Woolavington and Graffham from 1833-51. The cost of the building was borne and the principal responsibility for its construction taken by Manning’s last Curate, the Rev Charles Laprimaudaye, who preceded Manning into the Church of Rome by a few months.  It was consecrated as a parish church in 1851.

The church remains much as it was then, the only addition a wooden shed and water tank on the north side. Portable gas heaters and strip lighting within the church. In the 1960s the church interior was painted in white and pastel colours against the advice of the Victorian Society, and the fine carved marble chancel screen was cut down in height, with an oak hand-rail added.

13th-century “Middle Pointed” Gothic in style. Despite being Butterfield’s only Sussex church, it is both absolutely correct in its handling of detail and recognisably a Butterfield creation in its determined wilfulness. At first sight this is a simple building, but the mark of a great architect is on it; it is all about massing, placement of features and articulation of detail. Description of the components almost misses the point, but here it is.

The west elevation is difficult to appreciate as it is hard against the west boundary hedge, unless you are the owner of what was the rectory adjacent.  There is a broad projection under a 3-light pointed window with decorated tracery and a corbelled-out wooden west turret with cusped louvred openings, and short pyramid spire. There are cusped lancets in the aisle end walls, and clasping buttresses, mirroring those at the east end. The nave and chancel south walls are otherwise sheer except for a single thick buttress of two weatherings to the nave and chancel. Stone copings and finial crosses.

There are pointed 2-lights to each bay of the nave with quatrefoils in the head, with the exception of the west bay on the south side, where there is a nicely detailed gabled timber porch, which has three square windows with leaded lights in each side wall.  There are 2-lights in the east aisle ends.  The heads of the aisle windows are right up at the eaves of the canted roof, no clearstorey. The lower chancel has a small lancet window to the west bay and then two 2-lights, with a 3-light to the east wall.  The north side has a lean-to vestry with plain doorway to the eastern bays and a single 2-light window to the west. There is a shouldered doorway in the east nave bay here.

Moving inside, the interior is whitewashed, quiet and dignified, fully pewed with attractive simple benches with curved ends and panelled backs but pleasingly clear of clutter, allowing the sparing use of ornamentation to have its intended impact. Virtually all of this is concentrated on the entrance to the chancel. Here there are oversized trumpet corbels to the east responds (these whitewashed) to the aisle arcades and even bigger ones to the chancel arch, both carved with tightly clenched tendrils.

Under them and connected by a colonette to the chancel arch corbels is a low Sussex marble chancel screen with buttresses and step and simple but effective tracery carving, which appears almost weathered as if the screen had been exposed to the elements.  Who did this carving? Nairn cites the style of Lethaby, and certainly there is much reminiscent of the later Arts-and-Crafts philosophy in all the work here. Unfortunately, as noted above, the top foot or so of the screen was cut down in the 1960s, an extraordinary act which has unbalanced the composition.

The aisle arcades have octagonal piers with some delicate foliate carving to the capitals, and double-chamfered pointed arches, similar to the chancel arch, the mouldings here dying into the wall above the corbels already described. The nave roof has a crown-post construction with tie-beams and collars, painted blue as are the simpler aisle and chancel roofs.

The floors are of quarry tile, with highly inappropriate mustard yellow carpet in the sanctuary masking encaustic borders here. Good choir stalls with tracery fronts and curved ends and high backs with carved cornices against the walls. Marble reredos and  internal hoodmould to the east window. Sedilia in the south wall, so simple and effective that again one would think Arts-and-Crafts.