St Peter, Thurston, Suffolk
Thurston is a substantial and busy village just off of the A14 not significantly from the edge of Bury St Edmunds, with the blessing of its have railway station on the Ipswich to Cambridge line. The church sits on the edge of the village, a massive, crisp developing that stands upright above the street to Pakenham. None of the rough-and-readiness of numerous of Suffolk’s rural churches listed here, for what you see from the road is solely of the 19th Century.
On this website, we have generally occur throughout the function of the unfashionable Victorian Suffolk architect Edward Hakewill, son of the much more well-known Henry Hakewill. He had worked thoroughly in Suffolk the 1860s, and is often great, at Kenton, for instance. But he can also be very undistinguished, as at Rushmere, Brantham and Shottisham. The explanation I was intrigued by Thurston is that it was the operate of his lesser-recognized youthful brother, John Henry Hakewill, and I was interested to see what he experienced received up to.
His brother Edward’s normal approach was to go in, build a north aisle, lessen the internal furnishings to a polite center-brow sacramentalism, and then leave. John Hakewill experienced fairly much more than that to do listed here, mainly because of anything that transpired on the night time of Sunday March 18th 1860. In popular with most Suffolk church buildings, St Peter had been enormously neglected via the 18th and early 19th Centuries, and its need for a facelift had come to be evident. In reality, John Hakewill experienced previously been engaged as the architect for a complete likely-above of the aged composition. But shortly ahead of midnight, supposedly on the night time prior to work was owing to begin, the tower fell.
It is difficult to envision the result of an incident like that on a tiny, distant, rural community. The a single long term, ageless construction in its midst out of the blue disappeared right away. The tower collapsed straight down, but slipping rubble took out the nave and aisle roofs, as nicely as destroying piers of both arcades. The parishioners made a decision to do the obvious, and retreat into the chancel for services. On the other hand, just ten times later, the relaxation of the nave collapsed, bringing down what remained of the arcades and roofs, and destroying all the furnishings, like the pulpit and lectern.
And so, a final decision was manufactured to rebuild from scratch, accommodating the new church to the surviving chancel and porch. As Roy Tricker factors out, Hakewill was very much of the prevailing view of the time that Adorned was the only suited style for a medieval church (despite the fact that Suffolk’s finest times are primarily Perpendicular), and, as a Bury Submit post of the time pointed out, Hakewill was identified that the new church ought to be completely in Adorned and proper architecture, changing the inferior architecture in the previous structure.
And so, there it is currently. The exterior is undoubtedly extraordinary, and the church reopened barely 18 months afterwards, at the charge of about £3,500, about 3 quarters of a million in present-day cash, an remarkable cut price I would have thought. This must have been a big church, even ahead of Hakewill’s rebuild – I questioned if it had been a match for Rougham, across the A14. Much of the chancel seems relatively authentic, irrespective of appreciable patching up. The imposing tower itself is starting to mellow with age, whilst potentially it nevertheless bears a disconcerting similarity to what could possibly be the tower of a Usually English Village Church in a product village, many thanks to Hakewill’s insistence on ‘correct’ Dec. But when you think about what Richard Phipson did throughout the road at Finborough and Woolpit for the duration of the exact same ten years, St Peter may well have received off frivolously.
You stage into a significant, tidy room total of mild – no gloomy north aise in this article. Inevitably, there is an city truly feel to the wholly 19th Century interior, although there are some before survivals. One particular of these is the font, a high-quality perpendicular piece whose foliage panels conceal a eco-friendly man or two. Can it have come from below initially? It is challenging to see how the font could have survived the collapse of the tower. Gathered fragments of 15th Century glass include a variety of striking heads, as effectively as sections of the figures of a cherubim, a pope and a bishop. Up in the chancel there is what seems to be a pair of delicious medieval angels holding scrolls, while they are, I think, 19th Century fakes. Absolutely 15th Century are the stalls under, nevertheless, which survived the drop of the tower and have pleasant minimal figures in the spandrels. There are a few a lot more medieval benches now positioned at the west end of the south aisle, also with green guys on them.
Bringing us proper up to date is one particular of Suffolk’s various sets of royal arms to Queen Elizabeth II (there are some others not significantly off at Rattlesden and Lavenham, among the other folks). This established is dated 1977, the 12 months of the Silver Jubilee. The woodwork in the nave is of a decent high-quality, presumably set up as portion of the similar commission as the rebuilding, but the reredos in the chancel is rather finer, the perform of Father Ernest Geldart, the Anglo-catholic carpenter-priest whose parish and studio were being at Small Braxted in Essex. Its fee may give us some thought of the churchmanship below at Thurston in the early decades of the 20th Century.
A identify that many will associate with Bury St Edmunds is that of the Greene King brewery, and the Greene household are commemorated below at Thurston. Sir Walter Greene paid for the restoration of the chancel. The memorial windows to the Greene household are by the stained glass firm Ward & Hughes, and ended up set up more than 30 several years from 1890 to 1920. Ward & Hughes had been a firm that went through three unique phases. In their early several years they ended up generally really attention-grabbing, as across the border at Pentney in Norfolk, for illustration. Afterwards in the 19th Century they turned one particular of the most significant mass-making workshops in the country, churning out countless numbers of home windows for hundreds of churches all more than the planet that are mainly of a comparable middle-brow high-quality. In the 20th Century, even so, the wheels came off a little bit, and the windows range significantly. There is a sensation that patrons were being presented much too significantly say in the structure, which is always a blunder, and often they can be fairly dreadful. But below at Thurston the glass is impressive. The 1890 glass is surely not operate-of-the-mill, remaining a edition in glass of Axel Ender’s portray Easter Early morning. Regardless of whether it is great or not is perhaps a matter of flavor, but the other two home windows are instead thrilling, and delightfully mawkish – witness the determine of Peace stooping to kiss the lips of Righteousness. There is a Ward & Hughes window in a equivalent design to these final two up the road at Pakenham.
Elsewhere in the church, the charming 1950 window of the Adoration of the Magi at the east finish of the south aisle is by E L Armitage for Powell & Sons, and it replaced damaged glass which commemorated a 14 months aged baby, Mary Adelaide Blake, who died in 1842. The date of the new window implies that the old one particular experienced blast damge in the Second Environment War, a popular fate for these Suffolk churches surrounded by American air bases. The finest window in the church, nevertheless, is at the east conclusion of the north aisle, and depicts the Boosting of Jairus’s Daughter in a tranquil, painterly style. It remembers Isabella Blake, who died in 1856, and no person appears to know who it is by. Intriguingly, provided that this is also to a daughter of the Blake family members, it appears attainable that the missing window in the south aisle was by the similar workshop.
For a lot of several years, Thurston church was tough of access, so it is pleasing to explore that it is now open to strangers and pilgrims every working day. Even much more, the indicator in the porch asks you to be thorough not to unintentionally lock the door on your way out.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-05 17:51:50
Tagged: , Thurston , suffolk , east Anglia , CHURCH
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