St Margaret, Leiston, Suffolk
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If you are hunting for grand 19th Century church buildings, don’t arrive to Suffolk. Outside the house the 4 significant cities, there are hardly any. The important exception to this usually h2o-tight rule is Suffolk’s most considerable 19th Century church, Edward Buckton Lamb’s St Margaret, Leiston, and there are abnormal explanations for it remaining what it is – unconventional in Suffolk, anyway. In the 1780s, the population of Leiston was about 400, making it a rather standard center-sized East Anglian village neighborhood of the time. But then, Richard Garrett expanded his Woodbridge blacksmith’s store by opening an engineering will work in Leiston, and individuals flooded into Leiston from all in excess of the area. The Garretts and the Ropes are two households whose names cast a long shadow in excess of this town, and are vividly remembered below in this church, as we will see.
The Garretts created agricultural equipment, rivals to their equally dynamic neighbours the Ransomes of Ipswich. Lots of of the ploughs and harrows that tamed the British Empire have been forged in Leiston and Ipswich. By the 1850s, the inhabitants of the village had attained 2,000. And by the early 20th century, it was over 4,000, a far more than ten-fold maximize in a tiny in excess of a hundred many years, unprecedented in a county wherever, by and significant, the Industrial Revolution was a little something that occurred to other persons.
It grew to become distinct in that extraordinary age of religion, the 1850s, that the medieval predecessor of St Margaret was just not huge ample any a lot more. We know that it was a very long, thin church. A present-day report describes it as ‘like to staying in a tunnel’, not uncommon in east Suffolk, despite the fact that St Margaret was lengthier than most at 128 toes. Lamb’s short was to establish a large, squarish, cruciform church, on the 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, pretty much in opposition to the new sacramentalist grain.
The rest of the Church of England at this time was fast paced rediscovering its Catholic roots, and experienced turned to the Camden Society and the Oxford Motion for permitted architects, who were designing in the good English medieval fashion. Lamb was by no signifies a single of these, which is possibly why he was selected here. He was a maverick, who ploughed a lonely furrow, mixing and matching and commonly reinventing in the Higher Gothic method. His only other get the job done in Suffolk is at Braiseworth, now redundant. His style and design for St Margaret was revolutionary – or, at the very least, his execution of it, for he altered the strategies as he went along, and entirely disregarded the limited budget he experienced been saddled with. The new church was aligned in the exact route as the outdated one, and was of about the identical length, but in a most abnormal form with a extensive central crossing and limited transepts each wider than the nave itself.
If you experienced arrive below in the previous ten years of the 20th Century as, for the very first time, I did, you would have uncovered the building filled with alternatively sombre mid-Victorian pews, the weakest function of the entire church, and no surprise, for Lamb had them produced of the cheapest stained offer, so that he could use the revenue for furnishings on other fixtures. But these have now long gone, and Lamb’s gloom has been dispersed to an extent by the big reordering of the first ten years of the 21st Century. The ground has been carpeted, the pews replaced with fashionable chairs. The nave and transept seating faces in direction of 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 well known in Suffolk of all important 19th Century architects, Sir Arthur Blomfield. But the finest and most extraordinary capabilities of the church are after Blathwayt’s time. In 1874, he was succeeded by Father Berney Wodehouse Raven, who cleverly and gently released high Anglo-catholic follow here. For the duration of the course of his ministry, and that of his successor Father Roe, and then in the yrs later on, the facets of this church that make it so singular observed their property listed here.
Lamb had foreshortened the chancel considerably, the good east window drawn ahead to impose alone. In the 1890s this was filled with glass remembering Mary Ann Garrett, the saints depicted being popular in the late 19th Century Significant Church custom. Mary Ann is depicted in her previous age as as St Felicity, the last figure, the whole piece the perform of Kempe & Co, not a workshop I’m a wonderful supporter of, but this is truly extremely very good. Six candles sat on the retable driving the significant altar, which will have to have experienced the Reverend Blathwayt spinning properly in his grave, for this parish embraced wholeheartedly the Anglo-catholic movement in the early many years of the 20th Century. The partitions were being embellished, vine stencilling climbs the inside of of the chancel arch, the place higher than the crossing disappearing into a mystical gloom. This was improved by Lamb’s most extraordinary aspect, a roof that looks like a mathematical puzzle, and was possibly motivated by, or a joke at the cost of, the renowned medieval roofs of Suffolk.
The most striking facets of this church’s 20th Century elaboration are just about solely the work of a person relatives, the Ropes, whose windows and reliefs are discovered in several churches in Suffolk, as well as church buildings and cathedrals all about the earth. They lived in this parish, and in the north transept, we locate the best hour of Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope (‘Tor’ to her loved ones – you can see her tortoise image on the proper hand facet). Mounted in 1959, the windows bear in mind Tor’s mother and father and a nearby medical professional. The remaining hand window demonstrates scenes from the Gospel of St Luke. The proper hand window, with the concept of St Matthew, is a memorial to her mothers and fathers, who died in the 1940s. Remarkably, the work that is listed here right now was only 50 % of that which was planned, for the two home windows in the reverse window are comprehensive of clear glass, but would have been intended for home windows themed for St Mark and St John.
The transept is made up of a bronze artwork nouveau memorial to the young Arthur Rope, intended by Dorothy Rope, his sister. She was also accountable for the war memorial exterior. One more Rope cousin, Ellen Rope, made the pretty, sentimental reduction of the Adoration of the Shepherds, but this has now been hidden away in the vestry which changed the kid’s corner in the 2006 reordering. The transept also contains memorials to the Garretts, which include the mural monument to Richard Garrett, who is buried outside the south door beneath one of the forged iron memorials his foundry developed. The triptych of the Blessed Virgin and child with Leiston Abbey in the track record was by the Marquis d’Oisy, whose operate can be located in other places in East Anglia at Thaxted in Essex. On the south facet, the transept includes the extensive rood beam put in ill-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 function of Henry Munro Cautley, diocesan architect at the time and designer of various these parts in Suffolk of a aspect he was wholly in sympathy with. An intriguing depth is the stained glass in the tiny window earlier mentioned his altar. It depicts St Edward the Confessor and St Anne. It was installed below in the 1930s, and at initial sight seems to be as if it could be the perform of someone like FC Eden, and then you detect the carefully drawn unhappy faces, the chequerboard flooring, the reduced-walled backgrounds, so usual of East Anglian figures of the late 15th Century. They are, in quick, remarkably articulate figures, and I couldn’t assist wanting to know if they may possibly have been designed by Cautley himself. The only recorded glass by Cautley was at the initial 1920s church of All Hallows in Ipswich, now the church hall to its considerably larger 1930s alternative. The subjects of the glass there have been not noted, and it has considering that disappeared. Is it beyond possibility that this is the glass from the authentic All Hallows, reframed and reset below by Cautley when he was making the new church there, and this small chapel right here?
It would not be real to say that the early 20th Century embellishment, and the early 21st Century reordering, have solely dispelled Lamb’s gloom, for that would be complicated in these types of a extensive house. But the church seems lighter and warmer than when I initially frequented it twenty decades in the past, and I couldn’t support wanting to know how wonderful it would be if the south transept home windows could be accomplished to match people in the north transept, perhaps by a further superior top quality East Anglian lady artist? Pippa Blackhall springs to head, if the PCC has any dollars.
Perhaps it is suitable that Lamb, a maverick architect, created this maverick church in this article, simply because Leiston is a most curious position. You get there from what is probably the wildest aspect of Suffolk, whichever way you enter it, to locate oneself briefly surrounded by purple brick terraces, council estates and flyovers. And then, you are out in the countryside again.
The most important searching road is, obviously, all 19th and 20th century, and has the really feel of a miners’ town in the north about it. The difficulties with towns that only have a single employer, of class, is what transpires when that single employer closes, which is precisely what transpired to Garretts in the 1970s. Then, Leiston genuinely did turn into like a miners city. The good salvation to the locals was the Sizewell nuclear ability station, which stands a mile or so to the east of Leiston, and employs just about all people in it.
A fantastic curiosity is the way that Leiston life in symbiosis with Aldeburgh, a town of pretty much accurately the similar populace just 3 miles absent. Aldeburgh, as you could know, is one of Suffolk’s poshest, classiest towns. Leiston, and permit us be frank below, is not. It is as if a typical town had been split in two, one part holding the massive residences, wine bars and designer dresses outlets, the other trying to keep the blue collar estates, working men’s clubs and business. And but it is Leiston which has one of the country’s most exceptional testimonies to Substantial Victorian Gothic, and to the Arts and Crafts motion.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-04-11 19:24:25
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