St Mary in the Marsh, Kent

On the marsh, 2

Of the many churches on Romney Marsh, St Mary in the Marsh is now one of my favourites. Standing alone except for a pub and a small group of houses, it signals its presence with a lovely splay-footed spire, on which the shingles make the transition from the the upper steep slope of the spire to the lower splay with a satisfying curve. From a little nearer one can see a small church of grey stone and the red roof tiles so common in Kent and Sussex, mostly built in c. 1300. On either side of the porch, though, are two large later windows each with two round-headed lights and a dripstone in the shape of a shallow arch – the hybrid form of design is a feature of that late Gothic (but without pointed arches) that antiquarians used to sneer at and call ‘debased’. These two windows are said to have been inserted in around 1800. On making their acquaintance, I was inclined to ignore the antiquarians’ sneers and to like them, and to reflect that their clear glass should make for a pleasant, light interior.

And so it proves. Inside, the church is whitewashed, paved with quarry tiles, furnished with box pews, and topped with crown-post roofs. These elements suggest that there has been no Victorian restoration and that nothing much beyond discreet repair has been done to the building since the insertion of those two large windows. The arms of George III, vigorously painted on canvas, no doubt by a local artist, adorn the north aisle. The result is both beautiful and, as we stood there on a quiet spring afternoon, it exuded an atmosphere of spirituality that made one happy to be present.

St Neots, Huntingdonshire

Stand-out steeple

When it comes to skylines in small towns, it’s often a church that dominate the scene, not necessarily a large industrial building like the flour mill in my previous post. But here in St Neots, where I noticed that flour mill, is a fine Victorian church tower that makes another notable contribution to the skyline. Like the mill, it’s also (mainly) in brick, and it turns out to be the work of the same architect, Edward Jabez Paine (1847–1926). The Paine family owned the mill that Edward J. Paine designed, and they were religious nonconformists, worshipping at what was then a Congregationalist church (now a United Reformed church), so there was a close personal connection between architect and client here too. In fact the architect’s father was actually a deacon of the church, so Edward Paine was a natural choice for architect.

Paine built a good gothic church, with a spacious interior, well lit with big windows, and with a west gallery for extra seating. But the striking feature is the tower. This starts as a square structure and turns into an octagon part-way up. At the point where the metamorphosis takes place there are pairs of square pinnacles at each corner, and there are single eight-sided pinnacles at the corners of the octagon too. The octagon is topped with a short spire. The spire is slightly stocky, but this doesn’t detract form the overall effect – to my mind it sets off the octagon, showing off the brickwork and dressed stone of this part of the tower. St Neots was fortunate to get this building in 1888, a time when many dissenting churches were benefitting from the wealth of the successful business- and tradespeople in their congregations. In my opinion, the Paines did their church – and their town – proud.

Haugham, Lincolnshire

Homage

Not far from the A16 in Lincolnshire is the small village of Haugham.* It’s a place that means something to me because, long ago, before I was so much as thought of, my newly married parents lived there. The view from their house took in the village church and it was impressed upon me, when my parents reminisced to me about their early years, that the spire of this church was special because it had been built in imitation of the great and graceful spire at Louth, the local market town (where my mother had worked before she was married), and Louth, as we all knew, had and has a very special spire.

Well, it’s true. All Saints’ Haugham was built between 1837 and 1840 to designs by George Willoughby§ at the behest of (and with funds provided by) the vicar, George Ascough Chaplin.¶ It’s very small, this church, and modestly constructed of brick with cement render. But the spire is similar to the one at Louth in its overall outline – the large pinnacles, linked by buttresses to the crocketed spire, together with the generous window on the upper storey certainly create a similar impression. It’s not a direct copy, but is certainly a homage.

The setting is outstanding. The church is in the middle of a field, approached by a green lane. In my parents’ time, rabbits jumped around the field, entertaining my mother as she took breaks from housework and remembered her young years working in an office in Louth, in the shadow of the greater church whose design the one at Haugham echoes. Such is the stuff of memory.†

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* Pronounced ‘Haffum’.

§ Some give the architect as W A Nicholson; Pevsner attributes the building to Willoughby (a Louth architect), saying that he may possibly been have assisted by Nicholson. 

¶ The Chaplins were local landowners and some members served as MPs in Lincolnshire. They certainly were landowners at both Haugham and nearby Tathwell in the 19th century, but I don’t know whether George Ascough Chaplin was squarson or if he was a benefice-holding younger son of this illustrious family.

† All Saints, Haugham, is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. There is more about the church here.

Louth, Lincolnshire

Top-drawer

I continue my group of posts looking back over buildings I visited earlier with a couple of Lincolnshire favourites. I’ve been to Louth many times, and whenever I’m there I look at the spire of the town’s parish church. If truth be told, it’s difficult to avoid looking at it – it’s by far the tallest building in the town, and dominates many views. As de Maupassant said of the Eiffel Tower, the only way not to see it is to be inside it. But while some people might not like the Eiffel Tower, what’s not to like about this glorious steeple? It’s not only the tallest parish church steeple in England but, to my mind, the most beautiful. Everything leads the eye upwards: the windows and openings, narrower in proportion at each level until we reach the graceful ogee canopies of the upper pair; the buttresses, stepping inwards as they rise* and leading effortlessly to the four pinnacles that surround the spire;† the upward-sloping flying buttresses that connect the pinnacles to the spire; and the spire itself, 135 feet from battlements to finial, its crockets beautifully carved and spaced (closer towards the top) with art and care.

The interior of the structure contains wonders too – a cavernous space at ground level and inside, at the top of the tower, the original medieval treadmill, known as the ‘wild mare’, for lifting stone and bells, one of only three medieval examples left in this country.

Louth’s tower and spire are discussed and illustrated in detail in Julian Flannery’s fine book Fifty English Steeples, which I reviewed before Christmas. I was pleased that the author likes this steeple as much as I do – it’s the culminating number 50 in his book both because of its superiority and because of its date – the spire was completed in 1515, at the very twilight of the medieval period. Flannery criticises very little of the design of the steeple itself – the tracery in the lowest window is a little pedestrian.§  I agree with his assessment. The completion of the spire was greeted with much celebration, including, of course, bell ringing and the distribution of bread and ale to all present, and who can blame them for carousing?

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*As is usual; although slightly less usual is the way the set-offs don’t coincide with the string courses that mark off each stage of the tower. The effect feels a bit awkward to begin with, but the overall impression is one of upward-sweeping power.

†Not strictly necessary structurally, but aesthetically highly successful.

§He also says, fairly, that the aisles are disappointingly low compared with the steeple, and he is not enamoured of the setting near a road…but that was not the fault of the original mason and Flannery's overall assessment is very positive.

Steeplechoice

Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples
Published by Thames & Hudson

This book arrived in my mailbag too late to be included in the handful of pre-Christmas reviews I posted last month. Once I opened it, though, and saw that its author’s favourite steeple was also my own, I couldn’t resist reading it – and then returning to its rich collection of photographs and drawings. So here’s a review, post-haste…

Fifty English Steeples presents author Julian Flannery’s selection of the finest medieval parish church towers and spires in England, from Saxon Earl’s Barton, Northamptonshire, to Louth, Lincolnshire (1515). They’re a varied lot: high and low, plain and ornate, square, rectangular, round, or topped with octagonal lanterns or spires. Their diversity comes shining out of the book’s many photographs and drawings – Flannery has surveyed all these towers himself, recording in painstaking and beautiful measured drawings their details of construction and design, and producing (for the first time) an authoritative list of their respective heights. The book would be worth having for these meticulous drawings alone.

However, it’s much more than that. Flannery traces a steady design development, taking in various broad types of tower and spire – the round towers of Norfolk, the ornate towers of Somerset, the plainer but still magnificent towers of East Anglia, broach spires, recessed spires, spires with or without crockets, spires with flying buttresses, and so on and on. Along the way, he pays attention to the design of windows, buttresses, parapets, pinnacles, vaults – to make a compendium of steeple architecture of the kind that has never been gathered in one place before.

The examples are all worth visiting and looking at. The book includes coverage of such triumphs of medieval architecture as the towers of St Cuthbert’s Wells, Leigh-on-Mendip, and Kingston St Mary (all in Somerset), Oxfordshire landmarks such as St Mary’s Oxford and Adderbury, great lantern towers like Lowick, Fotheringhay, and Boston, East Anglian monsters like Lavenham, and finally the great Lincolnshire spires, Louth above all. Louth is my personal favourite, a spire of unique gracefulness, and Flannery’s contender for the ultimate late-flowering of the medieval English steeple. There it is on the book’s cover above, 287 feet of glorious early-16th century architectural flair.

Emerging from all this detail and all these examples is a broad pattern of development that has little to do with the conventional classification of medieval architecture (which works, up to a point, for window tracery and vaulting, but is less useful for steeples). Another theme is how so many of the best parish church steeples are either on or within striking distance of the limestone belt – not an invariable rule but a reminder that these structures are often showcases of the masons’ sense of being at home with their materials. A further theme is the effect of elements such as buttresses and string courses on the appearance of towers. Yet another is the varied ways in which masons made the transition from square tower to usually octagonal spire.

The real triumph of this book is how it manages to look at an architectural phenomenon that we take for granted and subject it to new and revealing scrutiny. Its value is built on various foundations: thousands of hours at the theodolite and drawing board; an awareness of both exterior and interior impact; a balancing act between empirical analysis and an architect's aesthetic judgement. Above all it's the author’s good eye that is alert to qualities such as the strangeness of Patrington; the influential nature of St Cuthbert, Wells; the power of Boston's great relieving arches; the grace and sweep of Louth's tall openings and ogees; both the structural and visual impact of a buttress or a vault. Most of us appreciate the beauty and importance of England's towers and spires; thanks to this book we will see them more clearly and in more detail than they’ve been seen since they were built.

Brightling, Sussex

Loafing about

This is the kind of thing I usually leave to Peter Ashley or those marvellous people at the Folly Fellowship. But now and then, I cannot resist…

A Sussex friend brought me here after a ramble around St Leonard's and an agreeable meal in a congenial country pub. I think John "Mad Jack" Fuller, 19th-century squire of Brightling, had had more to drink than we did when he made a bet with a friend that he could see the spire of Dallington church from his lawn. On arriving home and finding he couldn't see the church at all, he hastily had this false spire built – allegedly in 24 hours – to change the view, fool his friend, and win the wager.

The false spire, long called the Sugar Loaf because it's exactly the shape of the conical "loaves" in which sugar was once sold, survives thanks to a repair campaign 40 or 50 years ago. Before that, it's said that someone lived inside the stone cone, although it must have been rather cramped in the brick-vaulted room inside – the whole structure is only 15 ft in diameter and 35 ft high.

This is the stuff of what used to be called "English eccentricity", but there's more. Fuller was a founding member of the Royal Institution, funder of the first lighthouse at Beachy Head, and saviour of beautiful Bodiam Castle. Not so mad, then, as he might sometimes have seemed. But he did build several other eccentric buildings on his estate (there's information about them here), and when he died, his parting shot was to be entombed in a large pyramidal mausoleum in Brightling churchyard. More of that story later.

Horton, Dorset

Inspired by Vanbrugh?

Readers of my previous post may be interested to see a picture of the church at Horton that I mentioned there. It’s a very unusual building, with a curious L-shaped plan and a striking tower topped with a stone spire like an elongated truncated pyramid. This spire and the tower’s cornice are similar to details appearing on plans made by Sir John Vanbrugh, famous as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, for Eastbury Manor at Tarrant Gunville. It’s not known who designed the church. There is a chance it could have been Vanbrugh himself, but it is more likely that it was designed under his influence, perhaps by John Chapman, the mason who is recorded in the churchwarden’s accounts as having rebuilt the tower and other parts of the building in the 1720s.

Whoever it was produced a strong design, in which the tower’s exaggerated cornice, the chunky window surrounds, and other details catch the light memorably, and in which the spire gives the place a special character. When Vanbrugh wrote a memorandum on church-building for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in London in the 1712, he expressed his wish that the new churches should be ‘monuments to posterity…ornaments to the Town, and a credit to the Nation.’ The imposing quality of the tower and spire at Horton embodies this wish for monumental churches – but this time in a rural setting. The result is as characterful a country church as you could wish for. Vanbrugh would no doubt have approved.

Kings Sutton, Northamptonshire

‘Northamptonshire for spires and squires’, says an old proverb, and Northamptonshire spires don’t come any more beautiful than this one at King’s Sutton, near the border with Oxfordshire. Its delicate, almost lace-like details suggest that it’s probably late-14th century, and although it was restored in 1898 it’s likely that it looks very much the way it did when it was built. The pinnacles, flying buttresses, and openings are classics of their kind. Pevsner’s Buildings of England volume on Northamptonshire calls it ‘one of the finest, if not the finest, spire in this county of spires,’ and it’s easy to agree.

Pevsner was not the only admirer of Northamptonshire spires. The Victorian architects who revived and developed Gothic church architecture used them as models of their churches. Many of these designers especially admired the Gothic of the 14th-century – they called it the Decorated or Middle Pointed style – and ‘Northamptonshire’ spires can be seen above the terraces of London and between the mills of Yorkshire towns.

The 198-foot spire makes a stunning centrepiece for Kings Sutton, with church, manor house, court house, and ironstone cottages around a green. A traditional rhyme praises some of the place’s other attractions:
King's Sutton is a pretty town,
And lies all in a valley;
It has a pretty ring of bells,
Besides a bowling alley:
Wine and liquor in good store,
Pretty maidens plenty;
Can a man desire more?
There ain't such a town in twenty.

Hats off to the inspiring churches and villages of Northamptonshire.