Church Heritage Record 623126

Nave of two wide bays and a narrow west bay, with aisles, porches, and clerestory; crossing surmounted by octagonal tower and spire; transepts; chancel with north organ chamber and south chapel, both in the form of aisles; north sacristy and vestry.

The church was designed by William White and begun in 1865; it was consecrated on 10 October 1866 by the Bishop of Salisbury. White (1825-1900) was a great-nephew of White of Selborne and began his architectural training with Squirrel of Leamington, afterwards joining Scott's office and working there with Street and Bodley who became his close friends. He was in practice in Truro and restored many Cornish churches. He identified himself with the revival of Gothic architecture, and contributed articles to the Ecclesiologist and the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society's Transactions in which he set out his theories of modern design, the design of churches and the use of colour in architecture. The vestry on the north was added at a later date by T Wallen.

The nave is short and tall, with a high pitched roof, and has two broad bays terminated by a shallow west bay. The west gable is flanked by octagonal turrets, in the southern of which is a spiral staircase, and these have buttresses against their west faces and a band of stone below the brick caps which is pierced with a series of quatrefoils. The west wall has no doorway, and the west window has an unusual and striking design of tracery which includes a broad band of stone up the middle in place of a mullion; this is pierced by quatrefoils and divides the window into two pairs of tall lights with a quatrefoil above each pair. There is a sexfoil in the head. The gable is decorated with diaper brickwork in Butterfieldien fashion (of which more is to be found within) and has two arches in which the bells are hung.

The clerestory has no windows in the short west bay, but the other two bays each have two two-light windows with trefoiled heads to the lights and quatrefoils, cinquefoils or sexfoils above each pair of lights. The bays are divided by pilaster strips which, strangely, do not rise from the level of the aisle roofs but from corbels about halfway up the clerestory walls. The aisles have single trefoiled lancets in the west walls, and the south aisle has a three-light window in the south wall beside the porch (this part of the wall is blind in the north aisle). The porches are quite small, with cross-gables, low angle buttresses, and stone seats along each side; they are lit by tiny trefoils in the side walls. The easternmost bays of the aisles are each lit by two two-light windows with quatrefoils in the heads.

The transepts are not as tall as the nave, but have gables of a similar profile. Both transepts have buttresses at each side of the gabled walls, and these are quite massive with shallow off-sets. The south transept has a four-light window with geometrical tracery, and there are three small lights and a sexfoil within plate tracery in the gable. The north transept has two tall two-light windows and two lancets in the gable; this seems to be in order to leave the middle of the wall unpierced to accommodate the boiler chimney.

The square crossing is capped by an octagonal top stage with two-light windows to the east, north and south (the west wall being obscure by the nave roof), and the clasping buttresses at the angles support subsidiary buttresses against the canted walls. The roof is an octagonal tiled spire with a slight bell-camber, and is crowned by an iron cross.

The chancel continues the rather French style of the nave, especially in the window tracery, some of which is reminiscent of the work of James Brooks. There are two bays for the choir and then a single deeper bay for sanctuary at the east end. The choir is flanked on the south by low chapel which looks extremely like an aisle, with a blind east wall and a doorway at the easternmost point of the south wall. Further west is a peculiar window of two lancets with their own separate hoodmoulds and a small octofoil set in a square stone above. Above, the choir is lit by two sexfoils within arches, like the heads of larger windows. The east wall of the south chapel has a stout buttress at the engle which is in the same place as a large buttress against the choir wall.

The sanctuary has a two-light window in the north and south walls, each with two short lancets and a sexfoil set in a large expanse of stone. The eastern angles are strengthened by massive buttresses rising to gablets grouped round pyramids, all the forms arising naturally from the use of brick without any stone dressings. The east wall has a large five-light window with intersecting tracery. The gable is crowned by a stone cross. The sacristy on the north side appears to be part of the original building, and lies under the window of the sanctuary. The organ chamber is much taller than the south aisle and the vestry under two cross gables to the north of it is a later addition.

The centralised plan of the church is an interesting one, which seems to have been popular in London during this decade. The use of constructional polychromy is clearly influenced by Butterfield, and the plan of the church also may well owe something to the church of St. Matthias, Stoke Newington, which that architect built in 1851-3. The blunt masses of the all-brick buttresses, on the other hand, are typical of a feature which looks forward to churches by such architects as Tapper who, by refining a much later style of Gothic to its basic elements, reached much the same conclusions.

The interior of the church is a remarkable example of dignified monumentality on a small scale, achieved by careful proportions and the intentional gradation of light so that the church is darker in the chancel than in the nave, where a large clear-glazed west window provides omple light for the congregation. A transition is provided by the crossing which, lit by the qualified light of a stained glass window from the south and the clear unchanging light from the north sets the choir and chancel apart from the people in the nave. A corresponding change of polychromy on the walls is provided by the use of different colours of brick arranged in diaper patterns in the nave and the addition of lightly applied stencilled decoration in the chancel.

The broad arches of the nave arcades rest on square piers of brick in place of the usual pillars, and these have simple moulded stone capitals of an idiosyncratic design. The western bay has a very much narrower pair of arches, and the font stands raised on three steps in the western bay of the south aisle, beside the main entrance to the building. The floor throughout the nave and crossing is paved with wood blocks under the pews and with red, brown and buff tiles, unpatterned, in the alleys. The arches of the arcades have roll-mouldings along the edges and are outlined with a moulding also, all executed in rubbed brick. The clerestory windows are shafted and between them brick shafts also support the timbers of the roof. The roof itself is a king-post construction with queen-posts also provided which have struts linked to the purlins. The walls in the spandrels of the arcades are decorated with bricks set in lozenge-wise patterns. This continues on the wall above the tower arch, where against a background of alternating black and grey diamonds on a red ground is set a large cross in white bricks on a black ground within a moulded vesica. The aisle walls have a moulded dado, above which are bands of bricks of slightly differing colours, and the cast bay of the north aisle is decorated with the same sort of painted embellishment as the chancel, though with more elaborate symbols such as angels in lozenges on the canted reveals and the text Faithful Unto Death on the wall behind the column between the two windows. Both aisles open into the transepts through arches surrounded by metal plates painted with texts. An unusual feature of the pair of eastern responds of the nave arcades are the colonettes on the west faces which continue on the sides facing the aisle with three more colonettes so that these arches in fact project beyond the base of their responds. At the outer aisle walls they die into the well surface.

The crossing is open up to a vault just under the roof, and the problem of four arches of three differing designs is subtly dealt with by the provision of slightly differing responds. The arch towards the nave has two slender attached shafts, the transept arches ench have moderate single attached shafts and the chancel arch has single attached shafts of yet larger dimensions against each respond. The arches themselves are more elaborately moulded than those of the nave arcades, and all are outlined by mouldings. The walls above are enriched by brickwork laid diaper-wise (as in the nave spandrels) up to a stringcourse. Above this there is a blind stage with three bays in each wall divided by slender brick shafts, and above another stringcourse there are two-light window in the north, east and south walls. The west wall has no window because of the nave roof. The intervening canted walls have squinches of double arches which are provided to transform the square plan into an octagon, and then comes the octagonal timber rib vault, painted blue and scattered with stars.

The purpose of each part of the chancel is clearly defined by the articulation of the building, and the chief division is into two parts. The western, which houses the choirstalls, is of two bays and has a roof of similar construction to that of the nave, while the eastern, which is the sanctuary, is provided with a brick vault of eight divisions. This is divided from the choir by a pair of shafts similar to those against the responds of the chancel arch. There is no figure or folinge carving, but all the enrichment is provided by the application of stencilled patterns of sylised flowers and foliage on the walls, and more flowers and stars on the roofs.

On the north and south sides of the choir, two arches open into the aisles, that on the south arranged as a chapel and enclosed by an iron screen, and that on the north housing the orgon, which also speaks through arcades of three arches at the upper level. The floor is two steps above the level of the nave, and there is a low stone wall with an iron screen and gates. Beyond the stalls are two more stops, with a third at the communion rails. At each side steps lead down into the aisles. 

The sanctuary has a brick vault, recalling the arrangement which Burges used at Studley Royal in Yorkshire to differentiate the sanctuary from the rest of the chancel. It has eight ribs meeting at a central point, and the brickwork infilling is decorated with chevrons and florets. The side walls of the sanctuary slope inwards slightly towards the east, giving the suggestion of an apse.