Church Heritage Record 606053

Two parallel rectangles forming on the south the nave and chancel and on the north a chapel; at the west end of the latter is the tower which also forms the entrance and at the west end of the former is the vestry.

The earliest evidence is of the thirteenth century, and the north aisle seems to have been rebuilt or enlarged in about 1470 (according to an inscription on one of the pillars). The church was restored by Richard Herbert Carpenter in 1888.

The architectural form of the church is very simple, consisting merely of a rectangle formed by two parallel chambers under their own gabled roofs and with a tower of rectangular plan at the west end of the north aisle. The tower is of three stages, broader from north to south than from east to west and with a doorway in the north wall which is Perpendicular with a two-centred moulded arch within a square head with a moulded label. To the east of it is the only buttress on the building, and there is a small empty niche above the doorway. The west wall is blind. The middle stage is marked from the lowest by a plain stringcourse and has a single cinquefoil-headed light in the west wall. The third stage has a lancet in the north and south walls, and the uppermost stage in its present form dates from Carpenter's restoration. It is weather boarded with louvred openings in each face, of three panels on the broader faces and two on the narrower. The hipped roof has an iron cross placed at the midpoint.

The north wall of the north aisle, which borders St. Alphege Lane, is of two distinct periods. The eastern part is basically thirteenth-century, and still contains one lancet of broad proportions of this date. It is flanked by two two-light windows of fourteenth-century date with trefoil-headed lights and a flattened quatrefoil above. The western part of the wall was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, and has a moulded stone plinth and three three-light windows with lights of equal height under square moulded labels. Two of the windows have cinquefoil-headed lights but the westernmost has ogee trefoil-headed lights. The east gable has a two-centred arched window with three main lights and panel tracery above the central light, and a pair of daggers above the outer lights. The east window of the chancel is of four lights with panel tracery in a two-centred arch outlined by a moulded hood. There is a slender pilaster marking the division between the nave and north aisle. The south wall, which is not visible from the street, has three two-light windows of a pattern similar to those in the eastern part of the north aisle wall and one lancet near the west end. The plainly chamfered south doorway has two mass-dials on the west jamb.

The interior of the church is an open rectangular space (although in fact the east wall runs at an angle to the north and south walls) divided down the middle by an arcade of five arches with two hollow mouldings carried on octagonal pillars with concave faces and moulded capitals and bases. At the east end there is a small semi-octagonal corbel against the respond, and at the west end a much more massive block of walling forms the respond, suggesting that the thirteenth-century aisle only covered the eastern part of the present aisle and that it was extended westwards in the fifteenth century. Against the second freestanding column from the west there is a small niche on the west face with a four-centred arch and a hood terminating in a rose and a knot. Beneath it a brass inscription plate records "Gaude Prude Thoma" (d . 1468) "per quem fit ista columpna". The floor is paved almost entirely with ledgers and the pews stand upon platforms. The raised floor of the chancel was paved with tiles in 1888, when a new reredos was probably installed. In the east wall, to each side of the present east window, are the outlines of the stone arches of the thirteenth- century triple lancets which originally pierced this wall. The sawn-off rood-beam survives in the south wall and in the north wall of the aisle is the rood stair, with an ogee crocketted arch with heads at the stops. The south windows and the similar third window from the east in the north wall have moulded rere-arches but the remaining windows are within plain chamfered arches. There is a simple piscina in the east wall of the north chapel with a trefoiled arch and a round drain. The nave roof has four tie-beams with octagonal king-posts and four-way struts and the north aisle roof simply has four cambered tie-beams.