St Peter, Thurston, Suffolk
Thurston is a huge and active village just off of the A14 not far 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 big, crisp building that stands upright above the road to Pakenham. None of the rough-and-readiness of many of Suffolk’s rural churches listed here, for what you see from the street is fully of the 19th Century.
On this internet site, we have generally come throughout the function of the unfashionable Victorian Suffolk architect Edward Hakewill, son of the more famous Henry Hakewill. He experienced labored extensively in Suffolk the 1860s, and is from time to time good, at Kenton, for instance. But he can also be quite undistinguished, as at Rushmere, Brantham and Shottisham. The explanation I was intrigued by Thurston is that it was the work of his lesser-regarded youthful brother, John Henry Hakewill, and I was intrigued to see what he experienced got up to.
His brother Edward’s typical solution was to go in, make a north aisle, minimize the inner furnishings to a polite center-brow sacramentalism, and then depart. John Hakewill had rather a lot more than that to do right here, mainly because of some thing that happened on the evening of Sunday March 18th 1860. In prevalent with most Suffolk churches, St Peter had been enormously neglected as a result of the 18th and early 19th Centuries, and its need to have for a facelift had become apparent. In actuality, John Hakewill experienced presently been engaged as the architect for a extensive likely-above of the outdated structure. But shortly before midnight, supposedly on the night time in advance of perform was thanks to commence, the tower fell.
It is tricky to picture the impact of an incident like that on a very small, remote, rural neighborhood. The 1 lasting, ageless construction in its midst quickly disappeared overnight. The tower collapsed straight down, but slipping rubble took out the nave and aisle roofs, as perfectly as destroying piers of equally arcades. The parishioners made the decision to do the obvious, and retreat into the chancel for companies. Even so, just 10 days afterwards, 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 selection was built to rebuild from scratch, accommodating the new church to the surviving chancel and porch. As Roy Tricker details out, Hakewill was extremely considerably of the prevailing opinion of the time that Adorned was the only suited design and style for a medieval church (despite the simple fact that Suffolk’s finest moments are generally Perpendicular), and, as a Bury Publish article of the time famous, Hakewill was identified that the new church should be totally in Embellished and suitable architecture, changing the inferior architecture in the previous composition.
And so, there it is these days. The exterior is surely outstanding, and the church reopened hardly 18 months afterwards, at the expense of about £3,500, about 3 quarters of a million in modern cash, an amazing cut price I would have thought. This have to have been a substantial church, even ahead of Hakewill’s rebuild – I puzzled if it experienced been a match for Rougham, throughout the A14. Considerably of the chancel appears somewhat first, even with appreciable patching up. The imposing tower itself is commencing to mellow with age, even though probably it still bears a disconcerting similarity to what may be the tower of a Ordinarily English Village Church in a model village, many thanks to Hakewill’s insistence on ‘correct’ Dec. But when you take into consideration what Richard Phipson did throughout the road at Finborough and Woolpit throughout the very same 10 years, St Peter may well have bought off evenly.
You phase into a substantial, tidy room comprehensive of gentle – no gloomy north aise here. Inevitably, there is an city feel to the wholly 19th Century interior, though there are some before survivals. A person of these is the font, a great perpendicular piece whose foliage panels conceal a eco-friendly guy or two. Can it have appear from here initially? It is hard to see how the font could have survived the collapse of the tower. Gathered fragments of 15th Century glass incorporate a amount of striking heads, as effectively as parts of the figures of a cherubim, a pope and a bishop. Up in the chancel there is what appears to be a pair of mouth watering medieval angels holding scrolls, although they are, I feel, 19th Century fakes. Absolutely 15th Century are the stalls under, on the other hand, which survived the drop of the tower and have pleasant tiny figures in the spandrels. There are a couple extra medieval benches now placed at the west stop of the south aisle, also with eco-friendly males on them.
Bringing us correct up to day is a person of Suffolk’s various sets of royal arms to Queen Elizabeth II (there are some others not considerably off at Rattlesden and Lavenham, among some others). This established is dated 1977, the yr of the Silver Jubilee. The woodwork in the nave is of a decent excellent, presumably set up as part of the very same commission as the rebuilding, but the reredos in the chancel is rather finer, the do the job of Father Ernest Geldart, the Anglo-catholic carpenter-priest whose parish and studio have been at Little Braxted in Essex. Its fee may give us some notion of the churchmanship listed here at Thurston in the early a long time of the 20th Century.
A title that numerous will affiliate with Bury St Edmunds is that of the Greene King brewery, and the Greene household are commemorated listed here at Thurston. Sir Walter Greene paid out for the restoration of the chancel. The memorial home windows to the Greene relatives are by the stained glass business Ward & Hughes, and ended up put in above 30 years from 1890 to 1920. Ward & Hughes have been a company that went by way of 3 unique phases. In their early many years they ended up typically pretty appealing, as across the border at Pentney in Norfolk, for illustration. Afterwards in the 19th Century they turned just one of the largest mass-making workshops in the country, churning out thousands of windows for hundreds of churches all above the globe that are largely of a identical middle-brow quality. In the 20th Century, nevertheless, the wheels arrived off a bit, and the home windows range tremendously. There is a feeling that patrons have been provided too a lot say in the structure, which is always a miscalculation, and often they can be really dreadful. But listed here at Thurston the glass is stunning. The 1890 glass is absolutely not run-of-the-mill, remaining a version in glass of Axel Ender’s painting Easter Morning. No matter if it is great or not is perhaps a issue of flavor, but the other two home windows are somewhat thrilling, and delightfully mawkish – witness the figure of Peace stooping to kiss the lips of Righteousness. There is a Ward & Hughes window in a identical style to these final two up the street at Pakenham.
Elsewhere in the church, the charming 1950 window of the Adoration of the Magi at the east close of the south aisle is by E L Armitage for Powell & Sons, and it changed weakened glass which commemorated a 14 months old little one, Mary Adelaide Blake, who died in 1842. The day of the new window suggests that the old a person experienced blast damge in the 2nd Globe War, a common destiny for these Suffolk churches surrounded by American air bases. The finest window in the church, nonetheless, is at the east finish of the north aisle, and depicts the Boosting of Jairus’s Daughter in a quiet, painterly style. It remembers Isabella Blake, who died in 1856, and no one looks to know who it is by. Intriguingly, supplied that this is also to a daughter of the Blake relatives, it looks feasible that the missing window in the south aisle was by the exact workshop.
For many several years, Thurston church was complicated of accessibility, so it is satisfying to discover that it is now open to strangers and pilgrims each individual day. Even more, the signal in the porch asks you to be very careful not to unintentionally lock the door on your way out.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-06 16:58:05
Tagged: , thurston , suffolk , east anglia , church
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