Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman
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design and production of outstanding contemporary glass. The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London has an entry, based on the excellent work of A. W. N. Pugin to the altar and reredos and the chancel chapels by H. Clutton and J. F. Bentley. London’s Brompton Oratory gets an entry too; it would be remiss to ignore this extraordinary piece of Rome in London. In common with earlier editions we have also included churches in the care of the excellent Churches Conservation Trust, the Friends of Friendless Churches – especially in Wales – and English Heritage.
As regards the structure of counties, we have followed all the modern ceremonial boundaries: this has necessitated a considerable re-ordering of Yorkshire, the merging of Westmorland and Cumberland into Cumbria, changes to Berkshire and Oxfordshire and several other counties. Rutland, the country’s smallest and fiercely independent county, has been retained, whilst Huntingdonshire and the Soke of Peterborough have been brought together within Cambridgeshire. Bristol is with Somerset, and London is in two parts, Central and Greater London (the latter containing Middlesex and the inner parts of Essex, Kent and Surrey). Greater Manchester and Merseyside are together with Lancashire.
Considerable effort has gone into checking the facts about each entry, and wherever possible we have corrected errors. For errors that we have inadvertently introduced or have failed to correct, we both apologise and welcome comments.
To those people who may be disconcerted by the disappearance from this edition of their familiar churches, we ask for their forbearance, and hope that we have explained with sufficient persuasion the reasons why. Above all what we have striven to achieve is a book that captures the spirit of the earlier editions, in a 21st-century context.
A book such as this is not possible without the work of many people, not least those who have contributed to the various counties over the years. In particular I would like to thank Sam Richardson and Helena Nicholls at Collins Reference for their enthusiastic support for a long and complex project. I would also like to express my gratitude to Mike and Ros Ellis at Thameside Media: their hard and painstaking work on the planning, design, mapping, checking and photography have been essential. Their enthusiasm and expertise has taken them, I suspect, way beyond their brief. I am also very grateful to Michael Lynch, former Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography, for his eagle-eyed and helpful observations on my attempts to disentangle Scottish religious history.
Many others have contributed more indirectly – those hard-working souls that keep (some) of our fine churches open, that write the individual church guides, many of which are of a very high standard, and the various organisations, particularly the Churches Conservation Trust, the Friends of Friendless Churches, the National Churches Trust and the many county historic church trusts, all of whom work tirelessly to preserve a priceless heritage – the parish church.
Richard Surman 2011
WALPOLE ST PETER: ST PETER – the porch to the church is vaulted in a beautiful sandstone, the bosses sculpted into the sleeping forms of foals, sheep and suchlike
© Michael Ellis
INTRODUCTION by Sir John Betjeman
PART ONE: THE OLD CHURCHES
To atheists inadequately developed building sites; and often, alas, to Anglicans but visible symbols of disagreement with the incumbent: ‘the man there is “too high”, “too low”, “too lazy”, “too interfering”’ – still they stand, the churches of England, their towers grey above billowy globes of elm trees, the red cross of St George flying over their battlements, the Duplex Envelope System employed for collections, schoolmistress at the organ, incumbent in the chancel, scattered worshippers in the nave, Tortoise stove slowly consuming its ration as the familiar 17th-century phrases come echoing down arcades of ancient stone.
Odi et amo. This sums up the general opinion of the Church of England among the few who are not apathetic. One bright autumn morning I visited the church of the little silver limestone town of Somerton in Somerset. Hanging midway from a rich-timbered roof, on chains from which were suspended branched and brassy-gleaming chandeliers, were oval boards painted black. In gold letters on each these words were inscribed:
TO GOD’S
GLORY
&
THE HONOR OF
THE
CHURCH OF
ENGLAND
1782
They served me as an inspiration towards compiling this book.
The Parish Churches of England are even more varied than the landscape. The tall town church, smelling of furniture polish and hot-water pipes, a shadow of the medieval marvel it once was, so assiduously have Victorian and even later restorers renewed everything old; the little weather-beaten hamlet church standing in a farmyard down a narrow lane, bat-droppings over the pews and one service a month; the church of a once prosperous village, a relic of the 15th-century wool trade, whose soaring splendour of stone and glass subsequent generations have had neither the energy nor the money to destroy; the suburban church with Northamptonshire-style steeple rising unexpectedly above slate roofs of London and calling with mid-Victorian bells to the ghosts on the edge of the industrial estate; the High, the Low, the Central churches, the alive and the dead ones, the churches that are easy to pray in and those that are not, the churches whose architecture brings you to your knees, the churches whose decorations affront the sight – all these come within the wide embrace of our Anglican Church, whose arms extend beyond the seas to many fabrics more.
From the first wooden church put up in a forest clearing or stone cell on windy moor to the newest social hall, with sanctuary and altar partitioned off, built on the latest industrial estate, our churches have existed chiefly for the celebration of what some call the Mass, or the Eucharist and others call Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper.
Between the early paganism of Britain and the present paganism there are nearly twenty thousand churches and well over a thousand years of Christianity. More than half the buildings are medieval. Many of those have been so severely restored in the last century that they could almost be called Victorian – new stone, new walls, new roofs, new pews. If there is anything old about them it is what one can discern through the detective work of the visual imagination.
It may be possible to generalize enough about the parish church of ancient origin to give an impression of how it is the history of its district in stone and wood and glass. Such generalization can give only a superficial impression. Churches vary with their building materials and with the religious, social and economic history of their districts.
The Outside of the Church – Gravestones
See on some village mount, in the mind’s eye, the parish church of today. It is in the old part of the place. Near the church will be the few old houses of the parish, and almost for certain there will be an inn very near the church. A lych-gate built as a memorial at the beginning of this century indicates the entrance to the churchyard. Away on the outskirts of the town or village, if it is a place of any size, will be the arid new cemetery consecrated in 1910 when there was no more room in the churchyard.
Nearer to the church and almost always on the south side are to be found the older tombs, the examples of fine craftsmanship in local stone of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Wool merchants and big farmers, all those not entitled to an armorial monument on the walls inside the church, generally occupy the grandest graves. Their obelisks, urns and table tombs are surrounded with Georgian ironwork. Parish clerks, smaller farmers and tradesmen lie below plainer stones. All their families are recorded in deep-cut lettering. Here is a flourish of 18th-century calligraphy; there is reproduced the typeface of Baskerville. It is extraordinary how long the tradition of fine lettering continued, especially when it is in a stone easily carved or engraved, whether limestone, ironstone or slate. The tradition lasted until the middle of the 19th century in those country places where stone was used as easily as wood. Some old craftsman was carving