St Margaret, Leiston, Suffolk
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If you are looking for grand 19th Century churches, never arrive to Suffolk. Outdoors the 4 massive cities, there are hardly any. The key exception to this in any other case h2o-tight rule is Suffolk’s most major 19th Century church, Edward Buckton Lamb’s St Margaret, Leiston, and there are abnormal motives for it getting what it is – unusual in Suffolk, in any case. In the 1780s, the inhabitants of Leiston was about 400, generating it a rather common middle-sized East Anglian village neighborhood of the time. But then, Richard Garrett expanded his Woodbridge blacksmith’s shop by opening an engineering performs in Leiston, and people flooded into Leiston from all above the location. The Garretts and the Ropes are two households whose names forged a prolonged shadow in excess of this city, and are vividly remembered here in this church, as we will see.
The Garretts produced agricultural equipment, rivals to their similarly dynamic neighbours the Ransomes of Ipswich. Numerous of the ploughs and harrows that tamed the British Empire have been cast in Leiston and Ipswich. By the 1850s, the population of the village had attained 2,000. And by the early 20th century, it was above 4,000, a additional than 10-fold increase in a small around a hundred several years, unprecedented in a county the place, by and substantial, the Industrial Revolution was anything that occurred to other people today.
It became obvious in that extraordinary age of religion, the 1850s, that the medieval predecessor of St Margaret was only not huge sufficient any far more. We know that it was a lengthy, slim church. A modern day report describes it as ‘like to staying in a tunnel’, not unusual in east Suffolk, although St Margaret was more time than most at 128 ft. Lamb’s transient was to build a big, squarish, cruciform church, on the web-site of its predecessor, retaining the noble 14th century tower. The church was to be fitting for protestant, evangelical worship, simply because the Vicar of St Margaret was a firebrand preacher, the Reverend J.C. Blathwayt, very much from the new sacramentalist grain.
The relaxation of the Church of England at this time was busy rediscovering its Catholic roots, and experienced turned to the Camden Modern society and the Oxford Movement for permitted architects, who ended up developing in the appropriate English medieval manner. Lamb was by no means one particular of these, which is probably why he was picked out in this article. He was a maverick, who ploughed a lonely furrow, mixing and matching and commonly reinventing in the Significant Gothic way. His only other function in Suffolk is at Braiseworth, now redundant. His style and design for St Margaret was innovative – or, at the very least, his execution of it, for he transformed the designs as he went alongside, and totally disregarded the restricted finances he experienced been saddled with. The new church was aligned in the exact path as the outdated a single, and was of approximately the same length, but in a most unusual shape with a large central crossing and brief transepts every single broader than the nave by itself.
If you had arrive here in the last decade of the 20th Century as, for the to start with time, I did, you would have found the building stuffed with fairly sombre mid-Victorian pews, the weakest attribute of the entire church, and no speculate, for Lamb had them built of the lowest priced stained deal, so that he could use the money for furnishings on other fixtures. But these have now gone, and Lamb’s gloom has been dispersed to an extent by the big reordering of the initially decade of the 21st Century. The floor has been carpeted, the pews replaced with modern day chairs. The nave and transept seating faces towards the central altar.
The new church was opened on August 31st 1854, by Bishop Blomfield of London, who had been born in Suffolk, and was, coincidentally, the father of that most prominent in Suffolk of all major 19th Century architects, Sir Arthur Blomfield. But the greatest and most amazing options of the church are just after Blathwayt’s time. In 1874, he was succeeded by Father Berney Wodehouse Raven, who cleverly and gently launched high Anglo-catholic practice below. During the training course of his ministry, and that of his successor Father Roe, and then in the decades later on, the features of this church that make it so singular identified their household below.
Lamb experienced foreshortened the chancel considerably, the wonderful east window drawn forward to impose itself. In the 1890s this was loaded with glass remembering Mary Ann Garrett, the saints depicted remaining well known in the late 19th Century High Church tradition. Mary Ann is depicted in her outdated age as as St Felicity, the remaining figure, the complete piece the perform of Kempe & Co, not a workshop I am a fantastic enthusiast of, but this is definitely very good. 6 candles sat on the retable driving the large altar, which should have experienced the Reverend Blathwayt spinning nicely in his grave, for this parish embraced wholeheartedly the Anglo-catholic movement in the early years of the 20th Century. The partitions have been embellished, vine stencilling climbs the inside of of the chancel arch, the place above the crossing disappearing into a mystical gloom. This was improved by Lamb’s most impressive aspect, a roof that appears to be like a mathematical puzzle, and was either impressed by, or a joke at the price of, the famed medieval roofs of Suffolk.
The most putting factors of this church’s 20th Century elaboration are just about completely the function of 1 family members, the Ropes, whose windows and reliefs are located in quite a few churches in Suffolk, as very well as churches and cathedrals all in excess of the entire world. They lived in this parish, and in the north transept, we locate the very best hour of Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope (‘Tor’ to her relatives – you can see her tortoise symbol on the suitable hand facet). Put in in 1959, the home windows remember Tor’s moms and dads and a nearby medical professional. The still left hand window demonstrates scenes from the Gospel of St Luke. The correct hand window, with the concept of St Matthew, is a memorial to her dad and mom, who died in the 1940s. Remarkably, the get the job done that is in this article currently was only half of that which was prepared, for the two home windows in the opposite window are entire of clear glass, but would have been supposed for windows themed for St Mark and St John.
The transept includes a bronze art nouveau memorial to the youthful Arthur Rope, built by Dorothy Rope, his sister. She was also dependable for the war memorial outside. An additional Rope cousin, Ellen Rope, created the lovely, sentimental relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds, but this has now been concealed absent in the vestry which replaced the kid’s corner in the 2006 reordering. The transept also has memorials to the Garretts, together with the mural monument to Richard Garrett, who is buried outside the south door beneath one particular of the cast iron memorials his foundry created. The triptych of the Blessed Virgin and kid with Leiston Abbey in the track record was by the Marquis d’Oisy, whose work can be observed elsewhere in East Anglia at Thaxted in Essex. On the south facet, the transept incorporates the very long rood beam mounted sick-advisedly in the late 19th Century, the removal of which can only have been a reduction.
On the north aspect of the chancel is a sweet minor blessed sacrament chapel, its 1930s woodwork the get the job done of Henry Munro Cautley, diocesan architect at the time and designer of several these parts in Suffolk of a attribute he was wholly in sympathy with. An intriguing depth is the stained glass in the tiny window over his altar. It depicts St Edward the Confessor and St Anne. It was installed right here in the 1930s, and at 1st sight seems to be as if it could be the perform of a person like FC Eden, and then you discover the meticulously drawn sad faces, the chequerboard floors, the small-walled backgrounds, so regular of East Anglian figures of the late 15th Century. They are, in short, remarkably articulate figures, and I couldn’t support asking yourself if they may have been built by Cautley himself. The only recorded glass by Cautley was at the unique 1920s church of All Hallows in Ipswich, now the church hall to its a lot larger 1930s alternative. The subjects of the glass there ended up not pointed out, and it has considering the fact that disappeared. Is it over and above likelihood that this is the glass from the original All Hallows, reframed and reset in this article by Cautley when he was creating the new church there, and this minor chapel here?
It would not be genuine to say that the early 20th Century embellishment, and the early 21st Century reordering, have totally dispelled Lamb’s gloom, for that would be tricky in this sort of a huge room. But the church seems lighter and warmer than when I first frequented it twenty a long time ago, and I could not support thinking how wonderful it would be if the south transept home windows could be concluded to match those in the north transept, perhaps by a further superior good quality East Anglian lady artist? Pippa Blackhall springs to mind, if the PCC has any revenue.
Potentially it is proper that Lamb, a maverick architect, created this maverick church here, because Leiston is a most curious spot. You get there from what is likely the wildest aspect of Suffolk, whichever way you enter it, to discover yourself briefly surrounded by purple brick terraces, council estates and flyovers. And then, you are out in the countryside once again.
The major shopping street is, clearly, all 19th and 20th century, and has the feel of a miners’ town in the north about it. The difficulty with cities that only have a single employer, of study course, is what happens when that one employer closes, which is particularly what happened to Garretts in the 1970s. Then, Leiston truly did grow to be like a miners city. The terrific salvation to the locals was the Sizewell nuclear electrical power station, which stands a mile or so to the east of Leiston, and employs just about everyone in it.
A good curiosity is the way that Leiston lives in symbiosis with Aldeburgh, a city of just about exactly the exact populace just a few miles away. Aldeburgh, as you might know, is a person of Suffolk’s poshest, classiest cities. Leiston, and allow us be frank below, is not. It is as if a standard town experienced been split in two, 1 part keeping the massive homes, wine bars and designer apparel outlets, the other preserving the blue collar estates, operating men’s golf equipment and market. And still it is Leiston which has 1 of the country’s most remarkable testimonies to Substantial Victorian Gothic, and to the Arts and Crafts motion.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-04-11 17:25:20
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