Church Heritage Record id18595

Nave, aisles, and chancel; and a west tower which is also the entrance porch.

Lancelot ('Capability') Brown was working at Croome, where he designed the house and landscaped the grounds, from 1751 until 1760; and it seems probable that he provided the designs for the new church which was begun in 1758, although the unsigned plan attached to the deed of conveyance of the site shows a simple Classical structure with a western portico. Brown was certainly familiar with Gothick, for he had just completed the stables and orangery at Burghley in this style. Robert Adam was brought in in 1760, fresh from Italy, to design the interior of the house; and there is an unexecuted scheme by him for the Interior of the church in the Soane Museum, where there are also designs for wood and metalwork which is still in situ. On these grounds the interior decoration has been convincingly attributed to Adam.

St. Mary's is an early example of the revival of interest in the Gothick style during the 18th century, and one of Capability Brown's architectural works, following closely after his work at Burghley House, Northants, (which is also) in the Gothick taste. The church is of line ashlar masonry. The tower, which stands at the top of a grassy rise, is tall and substantial; it has angle buttresses, and is of three stories. The stories are divided by moulded string-courses or cornices which penetrate the buttresses. In the centre of the west face of the first stage is the arched entrance portal which is both tall and deep; on the north and south sides are similar arches, but these are blind. The second storey is much shorter, with a single quatrefoil window in the centre of each face, but the third and topmost storey is elaborately treated. The buttresses, which are now no more than pilaster strips, have an additional narrower pilaster superimposed upon them. This produces the effect of a clustered shaft at each corner of the tower, and the effect is strengthened by the cornice, which here runs round the outside of the buttresses serving as a capital to each shaft. In the centre of every face of the tower, under a skinny hood moulding, is a large four-light window with cusped inter-lacing tracery in the head. The lower sections of the north and south windows are panelled. Above the cornice is a band of quatrefoil decoration and over that a pierced parapet with small crocketted corner pinnacles. The body of the church is much plainer. The west wall is blank, apart from empty canopied niches flanking the tower. A. string-course at cill-level links these niches with the windows in the rest of the building — three on each side of the nave, two blind ones on each side of the chancel, and a single three-light window in the east wall. battlemented parapet and a moulded cornice follow the line of the shallow pitched roof. The corners of the roof and the eastern gables of nave and chancel are emphasised by small pinnacles.

In the west porch the vault, with its twelve radiating ribs, provides a mild foretaste of the Gothick within. The nave is of three bays, broad and high, supported on piers of quadruple shafts with two responds. These carry what is, in effect, an entablature decorated with Gothic motifs; but for some reason the piers are much too wide for the entablature they support and project on either side of it. The shallow elliptical plaster ceiling is divided into three sections by transverse strips of moulding, and in the centre of each section is a large and elaborate plaster boss. The ceilings are painted white throughout, the walls and piers cream. The aisles have flat roofs which are also divided into three, and the entablature of the nave arcade is carried round the top of the aisle walls as a cornice. Both aisles are lit by three large windows of two main lialhts with a dagger in the head. The windows are set in deep reveals with crocketted ogee surrounds. In the centre of the west wall is the entrance doorway, set under an ogee relieving arch whose topmost crocket almost touches the ceiling. The double doors have trefoil-headed panelling, and there is comparable work in the tympanum of the door arch. The chancel arch mirrors the relieving arch in the west wall, but has Commandment and Creed boards on the imposts. The chancel beyond it is of the same width as the nave, though slightly lower, and the curve of the roof is slightly more acute. There is a single large oval ceiling boss.