Church Heritage Record 610098

Nave and chancel under one roof with three-sided eastern apse; south porch; north aisle with a small vestry in the angle with the chancel.

Nave 63ft by 26 ½ ft; chancel 24ft by 26 ½ ft; north aisle 16ft wide.

The church was designed by Messrs. Scott and Suter and built in 1864. It was thus an early work of Edmund Scott whose masterpiece is the enormous church of St. Bartholomew Brighton (1872-4). Scott also designed the chancel and nave roof of All Souls, Brighton (1879, now demolished) and remodelled the interior of Christ Church Montpelier (1886, also demolished). Complete churches by him were St. Saviour, Preston, Brighton (1886, also demolished), Keymer (rebuilt 1866) and Buxted (1885-6).

The church was built to serve the outlying houses which were beginning to be built about that time in the southern part of the parish towards the sea and away from the parish church. The site was given by the Revd. William Hall, rector of Saxham Parva, Suffolk; the builders were Messrs. Cheesman and Company and the cost £1,541. The church was dedicated on St. Luke’s Day, 18 October, 1864 by the Lord Bishop of Chichester and a parish was formed in 1876, when the first incumbent was appointed. The north aisle was added in 1890 to designs by Reginald Blomfield, whose church works are very small in number. It cost £911.

The vestry at the east end of the north aisle was damaged by an arson attack in 1995 and is still unusable and unsafe, consequently an area at the west end of the aisle is used as a priest’s vestry.

This modest building bears no signs of particular individuality of thought such as Scott was to show at St. Bartholomew’s. It could in fact be a routine design for a chapel of ease by a busy architect such as Ewan Christian. It is a simple rectangle with an apse at one end and a south porch, and a later aisle added on the north side, under its own gable. The windows of the older part are all lancets with trefoiled heads and there are no buttresses, except in one place on the south side to mark the transition from nave to chancel.

The west elevation faces the road. The larger nave gable has two bands of brick amongst the flint facing and a three-light window of graded trefoil-headed lancets set in stone plate tracery with recessed roundels in the spandrels. The moulded hood has uncarved stops. In the gable above is a roundel carved with a cross. The north aisle gable has a simpler west window of three graded lancets.

The south wall has a small porch near the west end sheltering the principal entrance and then two pairs of lancets and a single lancet before a larger window set under a gablet in the south wall of the chancel, of two lights with a quatrefoil above. The gablet breaks through the slope of the roof. On the ridge of the roof over the junction of nave and chancel (which is not expressed externally except by the buttress) is a small fleche with a six sided lantern which originally had open trefoiled timber arches but was rebuilt in 1954 with timber louvres. The apse has a single lancet in each of its three very plain faces.

The north aisle has a doorway near the west end of the north wall and then three windows composed of groups of three lancets. At the east end is a small vestry with a doorway and window, very plain, in the north wall.

The interior shows a strong contrast between the original building and the later aisle because the 1864 nave and chancel have plastered and whitewashed walls and the aisle has exposed brick facings with stone dressings; the trees and undergrowth outside the windows serve to intensify the lack of light in the aisle. The floor is laid with red tiles in the alleys of the nave with low timber platforms under the pews.

The west end of the nave is raised on one step but the north aisle is paved with wood blocks. The chancel floor has tiles patterned with fleurs-de-lys. The roof of the nave has arch-braced collars and tie-beams at each bay and the chancel arch is merely an arch-braced principal carried on small stone shafts at each side set on tapered scallopped corbels. The chancel roof is painted with stars on a very dark blue ground between the beams and with small four-petalled flowers along the beams themselves.

The north arcade is of four bays with rectangular piers of brick with stone dressings and chamfered angles into which the wave mouldings along the edges of the arches die. The brickwork is laid in English bond and the roof has closely set arch-braced rafters giving the effect of a cradle vault. The east wall is blind but for a small doorway leading to the vestry and on it is suspended the organ. In the north wall is small piscina.