Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman
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its proportion. These architects favoured two kinds of proportion when they were building in the Gothic style – almost all of them designed Byzantine and classic churches as well – and they were either height and narrowness, or breadth and length. Their churches either soar or spread.
The Sung Eucharist is probably from the Prayer Book and with a crowd of acolytes at the altar. Blue incense rises to the golden reredos and the green Kempe window. The English Hymnal is used, and plain-song or more probably, Eyre in E [flat] or Tours in C. Candlelights twinkle in the mist. The purple Lenten chasuble of the priest is worn over amice, alb, stole and maniple, and there is discussion of these things after the service and before among servers and the initiated. We are in a world which feels itself in touch with the middle ages and with today. This is English Catholicism. There is much talk of Percy Dearmer, correct furnishings and vestments, the Prayer Book and how far one is justified in departing from it. After church the acolytes in their Sunday suits hang round the porch, and the young curates too, and there is a good deal of backslapping and chaff. For months the Mothers’ Union and women’s guilds of the church have been working on banners and a frontal to be ready for Easter. From these suburban parishes much of the Church life of modern England has sprung. They have trained their people in faith and the liturgy, they have produced many of the overseas missionaries and parish priests of today.
We are in modern times, out of the older and rich suburbs with their garden city atmosphere of guild craftsman and Sarum Use, and into the big building estates. The large areas of semi-detached houses, built by private speculators or councils, have been eating up our agricultural land since 1920. They have been brought about by the change in transport from steam to motor-bus and electric train. People are moving out of the crowded early Victorian industrial lanes and terraces, into little houses of their own, each with its little patch of garden at the back and front, each isolated from its neighbour by social convention, in districts where miles of pavement enlivened by the squeak of perambulators lead to a far-off bus route and parade of chain stores, and a distant vita-glass school, used as a Community Centre in the evenings. To these places, often lonely for all the people in them, is the new mission Church.
Just as there is today no definite modern style in England, except in what is impermanent – exhibition buildings, prefabs, holiday camps and the like, so there is no definite modern church style. In the period between the two wars church architects were too often concerned with style, and they built places of worship which vied with the local Odeon or with by-pass modern factories in trying to be ‘contemporary’. They now look dated, and will, I fear, never look beautiful. But the purpose of the church remains the same as it was at the beginning of this book, to be a place where the Faith is taught and the Sacraments are administered.
TUDELY: ALL SAINTS – one of the windows created by Marc Chagall to commemorate Sarah Venetia d’Avidgor Goldsmid, who drowned in the 1960s
© Richard Surman
DUNSTABLE: ST PETER – a red brick wall now stands where the church’s eastern end was abruptly truncated
The north-bound train traveller from St Pancras retains a poor impression of Bedfordshire, the verdict generally being one of flat Midland scenery, at its more unrelieved; this is as unfair as it is uninformed. Sadly, many of the villages and small towns within easy reach of the M1 or major stations have been engulfed by large modern housing estates. However, it must be admitted at once that the central clay vale is a wilderness, raped for brick-making, and with a similar fate awaiting still-virgin land. Otherwise the county, for its limited area, is varied to a degree that is unique.
In the north the Ouse winds through a landscape of gracious tranquillity, a summer country of stone villages and broad water meadows which rises in the north-east to a continuation of Walpole’s ‘dumpling hills’ of Northamptonshire. This is often surprisingly lonely country and, though the woods are now few and far between, the ghost of the old ‘Bruneswald’ forest still haunts the land.
In the centre of the county lies the Greensand ridge, a corridor of fifteen miles which historian W. G. Hoskins (1908–92) in his book Midland England considered ‘unsurpassed in sanctity and peculiar purity’; it broadens in the west to the ducal country of Woburn, scenically magnificent with pine-woods and open heaths. In the east, being in part overlaid by clay and dissected by the River Ivel, the scenery is even more varied. Old Warden in particular retains a delightful Victorian picture-book quality almost unimpaired.
Beyond the Greensand the Gault clay valley is a prelude to the chalk hills, and, save around Toddington where a considerable elevation is reached, is subdued to them; it is largely unspoiled country, much of it formerly marsh of which Flitwick Moor remains as a fragment. There are one or two chalk outliers in the valley, of which Shillington church hill is the most renowned, and Billington the most beautiful.
The chalk reaches its greatest development at Dunstable, but its greatest beauty in the folded coombes and open windswept downs around Barton. At Totternhoe Knolls, a promontory of the lower chalk overlooking the vast Aylesbury Vale and the line of the Chilterns to the west, lies the site of the old quarries that gave to this area a building stone of poor external weathering quality, but one which served as inspiration for a local school of 13th-century carving, little known, but of high artistic merit.
Luton forms an industrial and suburban area ‘as unexpected as it is unprepossessing’, and with the dreadful tentacle that links it to Dunstable has straddled a large area of the foothills to the Downs. Much of the surrounding countryside is losing the battle against suburbia, and unforgivable crimes have been committed in the hills, the worst perhaps the cutting of the skyline at Totternhoe. In spite of all this, however, much charming country remains, particularly around Studham and Kensworth, where at 700 feet the chalk attains its highest elevation in the county.
The varied geology of Bedfordshire is echoed in the variety of its churches; in the north of the county the influence of Northamptonshire masons appears in the number of stone spires, fine ashlar masonry, and the use of the ferruginous brown stone which has been the scenic ruin of the iron-mining districts of the neighbouring county. Wymington is the finest example, but Swineshead and Podington have churches of very great merit. Two of the grandest buildings in the county, Felmersham church of the 13th century, and Odell of the 15th, lie in this area. The sandstone country has contributed a building stone which gives great character to the churches of the district; Northill is one of the most perfect examples. The churches of the south of the county are sometimes not very convincing from the outside, since the Totternhoe stone has often weathered so badly that they have been encased in 19th-century cement plaster with frightful aesthetic result. Flint used in chequerboard pattern with clunch, a soft chalky limestone, is a feature here and there, and a very attractive one. The showplaces of the area are Dunstable Priory, and the churches of Leighton Buzzard, Eaton Bray and St Mary’s, Luton.
Until the 20th century Bedfordshire escaped the overbuilding of, for example, Hertfordshire, and in consequence Victorian church building is limited to Bedford, Luton and one or two examples connected with the big estates, of which Clutton’s magnificent St Mary’s, Woburn is outstanding. Scott gave Turvey church a chancel which it would be a euphemism to call a vigorous example of his mature style; more suitable to some rich inner London suburb than a village church, it is saved by impeccable craftsmanship, and a Collyweston (limestone slate) roof. Scott also worked at Eversholt in 1864 but on a more limited scale. There is one building that must be seen by those who like their Victorian architecture ‘neat’, and that is the Bury Park Congregational church of 1895, an early example of art nouveau Gothic which is one of Luton’s many architectural surprises; it is difficult to imagine it ever having been on paper! There is one interesting 20th-century church, St Andrew’s, Blenheim Crescent, Luton, a fine work by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in his Cambridge University library