Church Heritage Record id18999

West tower; rectangular nave and chancel of six boys under one roof. The chancel is differentiated internally but not externally.

A mediaeval church stood on this site, but this was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the late fifteenth century. This second church, having become derelict, was in turn almost entirely pulled down in 1733 and replaced by the present building.

Mr. Howard Colvin, in his Dictionary of English Architects, refutes the formerly favoured theory that the church built in 1734-36 was designed by Thomas White, a pupil of Wren, and suggests convincingly that it was in fact the work of Edward and Thomas Woodward of Chipping Camden, pointing out that the cast front resembles that of St. John's, Gloucester which they had just finished, and that the ogee surrounds to the tower windows are derived from similar features on Chipping Camden church.

Two small vestries were built on the north side in 1911, but the church itself was hardly disturbed save for the construction of one doorway from the newel staircase in the tower to the choir vestry and of a second doorway from the north-east bay to the priest's vestry. The interior was restored and re-decorated in 1959.

The church is faced with ashlar masonry of sandstone, the roof being covered with slates. 

The tower is set back from the street and rather unobtrusive. It is not tall, but the vertical element is emphasised by strips of masonry which run up through all four storeys each side of the windows, to terminate in a flattened ogee arch above the belfry opening. The corners are supported by diagonal buttresses which are set back in rhythm with the stringcourses which mark the stages.

The west door in the ground floor has a round arch with a renewed mask carved on the keystone. A stone lintel forms the head of the doorway and is decorated with carved fronds.

The succeeding stages of the tower all follow a uniform design, each face with a two-light window under a flattened ogee head, those without openings nevertheless having blind windows to complete the pattern. One blind window on the west face has a later clock face set within it, and all the openings of the belfry stage are louvred. The parapet is capped with a balustrade, yet the corners are crowned with 'Gothic' pinnacles. The combination of classical with Gothic motifs is so skilful as to be acceptable as a natural solution to the alliance of the old basis of tower with the Georgian re-facing.

The south wall of the church has six identical bays marked by pilasters with stopped fluting standing upon a plinth about eight feet above ground level. The plinth also forms the sill for big round headed windows which have rectangular blocks as imposts and unadorned keystones. The solid parapet conceals a hipped roof.

Architectural elaboration is reserved for the treatment of the east wall, which faces a larger open space than any other part of the church. The facade istreated as three distinct units, of which the central is the most important and the most carefully arranged. A Venetian window framed by fluted Ionic pilasters is set within a pediment which stands slightly forward from the plane of the flanking walls. The keystone, carved as a characterful head, is a delighfully human touch amidst a serious attempt to impress. The wall under the window presented a problem because the large space needed to be articulated. The solution adopted is that the window stands above a plinth upon which rests a further, smaller, plinth broken by four balusters under the central light which have no structural function at all.

The flanking walls have windows of the same pattern as those in the south wall, and, beneath them doors of a similar design but smaller proportions (that on the south is in fact blind). The blind parapet which surmounts the south wall continues across the east wall, with the pediment over the east window covering most of the middle part. Above stands a clock face within an aedicular surround supported by flanking scrolls. This feature, odd though it must always have looked perched above a pediment, looks even more out of place since the removal of four urns which formerly also rose above the parapet. Their removal has detracted greatly from the effect of the facade, which now looks unfinished and heavy.

The north wall of the church is hardly visible because of surrounding buildings, and must always have been so for beyond the first bay from the east, all decoration ends and the wall is faced with less smoothly chiselled masonry.

The west porch occupies the ground floor of the tower, and contains two particularly good eighteenth-century monuments. The fine woodwork of the inner doors is a foretaste of the interior of the church itself, but it is important to note, behind the south wing of the west door, a stoup for holy water which survives from the late-mediaeval church. The spiral staircase in the north-east corner of the tower is also of the earlier building.

At the west end , the corner buttresses of the tower project a little way into the church, but have been turned to good advantage by suggesting the shape of the organ gallery. This is on plan three sides of an octagon, supported upon two square piers which stand at the corners of the box pews, the whole arrangement thus tied together into a unity. Beneath the gallery on the south side is the christening pew, with an elegant marble font in the centre surrounded on each side by benches.

The chancel is flanked by screens which cut off small rectangles in the north- east and south- east corners of the church, one a porch for the north- east door and the other, formerly the vestry, now used as a chapel. These screens curve upwards to become bases for a pair of fluted Tuscan columns which rise to the roof and form an architectural framework for the sanctuary.

The small room to the south of the sanctuary, which must have been a very small vestry, now holds a small altar with a silk throw-over frontal and modern altar ornaments, forming a chapel for the reservation of the Sacrament.

The ceiling is a curved segmental vault of plaster applied to a light wooden framework which hangs from the tie beams of the roof on iron rods. It is divided into panels of triangular shape by moulded ribs, also of plaster, springing from corbels against the wall-head which are partly Gothic and partly Baroque (having winged cherubs' heads at the bottom). The wider panels of the roof are embellished with roundels each containing a floret of different design, and in place of a ridge, the centre is flat with ribs each side; these curve at intervals round plaster bosses, again all different, but of foliage rather than flowers. Over the sanctuary the pattern is interrupted by three wide concentric circles which frame the monogram IHS in a triangle surrounded by a glory and two rings of winged cherubs' heads.