St Peter, Thurston, Suffolk
Thurston is a large and hectic village just off of the A14 not significantly from the edge of Bury St Edmunds, with the blessing of its own railway station on the Ipswich to Cambridge line. The church sits on the edge of the village, a significant, crisp building that stands upright above the highway to Pakenham. None of the rough-and-readiness of lots of of Suffolk’s rural church buildings right here, for what you see from the road is entirely of the 19th Century.
On this website, we have normally come across the work of the unfashionable Victorian Suffolk architect Edward Hakewill, son of the more famed Henry Hakewill. He experienced labored extensively in Suffolk the 1860s, and is sometimes very good, at Kenton, for instance. But he can also be extremely undistinguished, as at Rushmere, Brantham and Shottisham. The rationale I was intrigued by Thurston is that it was the perform of his lesser-regarded more youthful brother, John Henry Hakewill, and I was fascinated to see what he had got up to.
His brother Edward’s standard strategy was to go in, make a north aisle, decrease the interior furnishings to a polite center-brow sacramentalism, and then go away. John Hakewill had somewhat extra than that to do in this article, due to the fact of some thing that occurred on the night of Sunday March 18th 1860. In prevalent with most Suffolk churches, St Peter experienced been greatly neglected by the 18th and early 19th Generations, and its require for a facelift had grow to be clear. In truth, John Hakewill had presently been engaged as the architect for a complete likely-above of the old framework. But shortly in advance of midnight, supposedly on the night just before do the job was thanks to begin, the tower fell.
It is difficult to imagine the influence of an incident like that on a small, remote, rural neighborhood. The one particular long lasting, ageless construction in its midst suddenly disappeared right away. The tower collapsed straight down, but slipping rubble took out the nave and aisle roofs, as properly as destroying piers of both of those arcades. The parishioners decided to do the evident, and retreat into the chancel for companies. Even so, just 10 days later on, the relaxation of the nave collapsed, bringing down what remained of the arcades and roofs, and destroying all the furnishings, which include the pulpit and lectern.
And so, a final decision was designed to rebuild from scratch, accommodating the new church to the surviving chancel and porch. As Roy Tricker details out, Hakewill was incredibly considerably of the prevailing view of the time that Adorned was the only appropriate model for a medieval church (even with the actuality that Suffolk’s best moments are primarily Perpendicular), and, as a Bury Publish posting of the time famous, Hakewill was established that the new church should be entirely in Decorated and accurate architecture, changing the inferior architecture in the aged structure.
And so, there it is now. The exterior is definitely impressive, and the church reopened hardly 18 months later, at the expense of about £3,500, about 3 quarters of a million in present-day funds, an amazing discount I would have thought. This will have to have been a enormous church, even before Hakewill’s rebuild – I wondered if it experienced been a match for Rougham, across the A14. Much of the chancel appears comparatively original, regardless of sizeable patching up. The imposing tower alone is beginning to mellow with age, despite the fact that most likely it still bears a disconcerting similarity to what could possibly be the tower of a Typically English Village Church in a design village, thanks to Hakewill’s insistence on ‘correct’ Dec. But when you think about what Richard Phipson did throughout the street at Finborough and Woolpit for the duration of the same ten years, St Peter may possibly have acquired off lightly.
You stage into a large, tidy room complete of light – no gloomy north aise here. Inevitably, there is an urban feel to the wholly 19th Century interior, although there are some earlier survivals. One particular of these is the font, a wonderful perpendicular piece whose foliage panels conceal a environmentally friendly gentleman 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 selection 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 appears to be a pair of delightful medieval angels keeping scrolls, although they are, I believe, 19th Century fakes. Surely 15th Century are the stalls underneath, even so, which survived the fall of the tower and have delightful tiny figures in the spandrels. There are a pair extra medieval benches now positioned at the west end of the south aisle, also with green males on them.
Bringing us appropriate up to date is just one of Suffolk’s numerous sets of royal arms to Queen Elizabeth II (there are some others not much off at Rattlesden and Lavenham, amongst other people). This set is dated 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee. The woodwork in the nave is of a respectable excellent, presumably put in as section of the similar commission as the rebuilding, but the reredos in the chancel is fairly finer, the do the job of Father Ernest Geldart, the Anglo-catholic carpenter-priest whose parish and studio were being at Minor Braxted in Essex. Its commission could give us some notion of the churchmanship below at Thurston in the early decades of the 20th Century.
A identify that numerous will associate with Bury St Edmunds is that of the Greene King brewery, and the Greene household are commemorated right here at Thurston. Sir Walter Greene compensated for the restoration of the chancel. The memorial home windows to the Greene loved ones are by the stained glass business Ward & Hughes, and were being installed over 30 decades from 1890 to 1920. Ward & Hughes ended up a corporation that went by three distinct phases. In their early yrs they have been usually quite fascinating, as across the border at Pentney in Norfolk, for instance. Later on in the 19th Century they turned one particular of the major mass-creating workshops in the state, churning out thousands of windows for hundreds of church buildings all about the globe that are mainly of a very similar center-brow excellent. In the 20th Century, even so, the wheels came off a bit, and the windows vary enormously. There is a sensation that patrons were offered as well significantly say in the layout, which is usually a error, and from time to time they can be rather terrible. But right here at Thurston the glass is stunning. The 1890 glass is certainly not run-of-the-mill, getting a edition in glass of Axel Ender’s painting Easter Morning. Whether it is excellent or not is most likely a subject of style, but the other two home windows are alternatively thrilling, and delightfully mawkish – witness the determine of Peace stooping to kiss the lips of Righteousness. There is a Ward & Hughes window in a comparable fashion to these past two up the highway at Pakenham.
Somewhere else in the church, the beautiful 1950 window of the Adoration of the Magi at the east stop of the south aisle is by E L Armitage for Powell & Sons, and it replaced broken glass which commemorated a 14 months outdated child, Mary Adelaide Blake, who died in 1842. The day of the new window indicates that the previous just one endured blast damge in the Next Entire world War, a common fate for these Suffolk church buildings surrounded by American air bases. The best window in the church, on the other hand, is at the east close of the north aisle, and depicts the Elevating of Jairus’s Daughter in a tranquil, painterly design. It remembers Isabella Blake, who died in 1856, and nobody looks to know who it is by. Intriguingly, provided that this is also to a daughter of the Blake loved ones, it appears feasible that the misplaced window in the south aisle was by the exact workshop.
For a lot of decades, Thurston church was challenging of obtain, so it is satisfying to uncover that it is now open to strangers and pilgrims each and every day. Even much more, the indicator in the porch asks you to be cautious not to accidentally 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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