Church Heritage Record 610081

6-bay nave with south aisle, south-west tower off the aisle, chancel, north-east brick addition, south-east vestry and south porch (no longer used), entrance now via west end of nave.

Nave estimated to be c 22m (70ft) x 9m (30ft).

Aldrington was a fishing village whose population dwindled in the 16th and 17th centuries.  The 13th-century church was ruinous by 1638 and the walls collapsed in the early 19th leaving only low walls and part of the tower standing. In 1878 when the area was being repopulated with the expansion of Hove, R H Carpenter rebuilt the tower and the nave (now the south aisle).  By 1936 so many people had moved into the area that the church was no longer large enough and H Milburn Pett, the diocesan architect, was asked to extend it.  He built the present nave and chancel to the north of Carpenter’s building and added the broach spire to the tower, but the planned north aisle was not built.  The lychgate designed by F A Crouch was built in 1949.  The solid screen that now separates the south aisle (formerly the church) from the nave was added in 1997.

It looks as though the tower and south-west corner of the nave may retain some of the medieval walls in their lower parts, and parts of the windows may be original here; this may be worth investigating further. The remains of the rest of the old church are likely to survive below the present building.  The site is of considerable archaeological potential and the SMR should be consulted if any development of the site is proposed.

The church is designed in the Early English style, lancets throughout, and architecturally very simple.  It could be taken as a medieval church which has undergone a heavy Victorian restoration, belying its complex and accretive development.  Successive architects followed the grain of the building to achieve a relatively cohesive result, at least externally.

The short tower with its broach shingle spire is a correct Sussex motif.  The tower is of two stages with low, set-back buttresses and 2-light louvred bell-openings. The roofs are quite steep, with plain copings and cross finials. There is a single lancet window to each bay of the nave, south aisle and chancel, the west end of the nave is pierced by a small 2-light plate tracery window to the low baptistery with a triple lancet in the gable above. In the middle of the south wall is a timber-framed porch with ornate bargeboards.  The east wall of the aisle has a 2-light plate tracery window with a sexfoil in the head, the west wall a pair of lancets which look to be in part from the medieval church. 

This is now partly masked below by the low long vestry block, with two coupled lancets each side of a pointed doorway. The vestry also cuts across the view of the chancel, which has three lancets in the south wall, two in the north and a stepped 3-light in the east wall. In this is a stone in the plinth inscribed: “This stone was laid with full masonic rites by the Right Worshipful Provincial Grand Master of Freemasons of Sussex, Major R.Lawrence Thornton CBE on the day of the 6 June 1936”. A photograph of this occasion can be seen in the vestry.

The interior is rendered, and very tidy and clean. As is often the case, the conversion of the old nave to a south aisle to the new nave has not worked well. In particular the 1936 nave and chancel are not well related to the form of the earlier church, exacerbated by the solid screen (with glazed heads) which now separates the two.  This has the effect of creating two separate spaces, but also making the nave to some degree symmetrical, as there is an identical blind arcade of chamfered piers with double-chamfered pointed arches on the north side where a north aisle was planned but never built, the blocking pierced by the lancets. Both the nave, chancel and south aisle have boarded pointed barrel vault roofs. Parquet floor in the nave and aisle, black and white marble in the chancel in a geometrical pattern.

The chancel arch is the simplest pointed arch and barely noticeable, and the absence of a screen (there is a low stone chancel wall) creates a tunnel effect, nothing interrupting the vista from the west end to the east. The nave has chairs which would appear to date to the 1930s when the nave was built, the chancel has choir stalls with plain panelled fronts and sides of the same date, the clergy desk with blind tracery sides may have been moved from the south aisle.  In the south wall is a 3-bay sedilia and piscina, and a pointed doorway. The western bay of the north wall houses the organ with its displayed pipes. Baptistery at the west end within a low pointed arch, flanked by pointed doorways.

The south aisle (the old nave) has much more intimacy; it has benches in the chancel.   The east end has an arch-braced scissor-truss roof, and excellent Minton floor tiles throughout what could instantly be used as a chancel, but is now effectively a completely detached side chapel.   The old nave part is effectively a blank canvas, with some chairs and tables scattered about.