St Margaret, Leiston, Suffolk
Abide by these journeys as they transpire at Final of England twitter.
If you are wanting for grand 19th Century churches, you should not appear to Suffolk. Exterior the 4 big cities, there are hardly any. The significant exception to this usually water-limited rule is Suffolk’s most major 19th Century church, Edward Buckton Lamb’s St Margaret, Leiston, and there are abnormal causes for it remaining what it is – strange in Suffolk, anyway. In the 1780s, the population of Leiston was about 400, generating it a fairly regular center-sized East Anglian village community of the time. But then, Richard Garrett expanded his Woodbridge blacksmith’s shop by opening an engineering works in Leiston, and people today flooded into Leiston from all above the area. The Garretts and the Ropes are two people whose names solid a extensive shadow more than this city, and are vividly remembered here in this church, as we will see.
The Garretts manufactured agricultural equipment, rivals to their similarly dynamic neighbours the Ransomes of Ipswich. Many of the ploughs and harrows that tamed the British Empire ended up 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 boost in a very little more than a hundred years, unprecedented in a county where by, by and big, the Industrial Revolution was a little something that occurred to other individuals.
It became obvious in that amazing age of faith, the 1850s, that the medieval predecessor of St Margaret was only not major adequate any a lot more. We know that it was a long, thin church. A up to date report describes it as ‘like to being in a tunnel’, not uncommon in east Suffolk, whilst St Margaret was for a longer time than most at 128 ft. Lamb’s brief was to build a substantial, 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, because the Vicar of St Margaret was a firebrand preacher, the Reverend J.C. Blathwayt, really significantly from the new sacramentalist grain.
The relaxation of the Church of England at this time was chaotic rediscovering its Catholic roots, and experienced turned to the Camden Modern society and the Oxford Movement for authorized architects, who were planning in the appropriate English medieval way. Lamb was by no signifies one particular of these, which is in all probability why he was picked out in this article. He was a maverick, who ploughed a lonely furrow, mixing and matching and usually reinventing in the Substantial Gothic fashion. His only other operate in Suffolk is at Braiseworth, now redundant. His structure for St Margaret was revolutionary – or, at least, his execution of it, for he altered the plans as he went alongside, and totally dismissed the restricted budget he had been saddled with. The new church was aligned in the exact same course as the previous a person, and was of about the same size, but in a most uncommon condition with a extensive central crossing and brief transepts every single broader than the nave by itself.
If you experienced come listed here in the very last ten years of the 20th Century as, for the 1st time, I did, you would have observed the constructing loaded with instead sombre mid-Victorian pews, the weakest element of the whole church, and no question, for Lamb had them designed of the cheapest stained offer, so that he could use the cash 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 initial ten years of the 21st Century. The ground has been carpeted, the pews replaced with contemporary chairs. The nave and transept seating faces toward the central altar.
The new church was opened on August 31st 1854, by Bishop Blomfield of London, who experienced been born in Suffolk, and was, coincidentally, the father of that most distinguished in Suffolk of all significant 19th Century architects, Sir Arthur Blomfield. But the very best and most impressive characteristics of the church are right after Blathwayt’s time. In 1874, he was succeeded by Father Berney Wodehouse Raven, who cleverly and gently launched large Anglo-catholic exercise below. Throughout the system of his ministry, and that of his successor Father Roe, and then in the yrs afterwards, the areas of this church that make it so singular identified their dwelling here.
Lamb had foreshortened the chancel dramatically, the good east window drawn forward to impose by itself. In the 1890s this was crammed with glass remembering Mary Ann Garrett, the saints depicted being common in the late 19th Century Substantial Church custom. Mary Ann is depicted in her outdated age as as St Felicity, the last determine, the total piece the perform of Kempe & Co, not a workshop I’m a good lover of, but this is really really good. Six candles sat on the retable at the rear of the significant altar, which should have had the Reverend Blathwayt spinning properly in his grave, for this parish embraced wholeheartedly the Anglo-catholic motion in the early many years of the 20th Century. The partitions have been decorated, vine stencilling climbs the inside of of the chancel arch, the area above the crossing disappearing into a mystical gloom. This was improved by Lamb’s most amazing feature, a roof that seems like a mathematical puzzle, and was both inspired by, or a joke at the expense of, the popular medieval roofs of Suffolk.
The most hanging factors of this church’s 20th Century elaboration are pretty much totally the do the job of just one household, the Ropes, whose windows and reliefs are located in a number of church buildings in Suffolk, as properly as churches and cathedrals all about the earth. They lived in this parish, and in the north transept, we come across the finest hour of Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope (‘Tor’ to her family – you can see her tortoise image on the right hand aspect). Installed in 1959, the windows keep in mind Tor’s mom and dad and a neighborhood health care provider. The left hand window exhibits scenes from the Gospel of St Luke. The appropriate hand window, with the theme of St Matthew, is a memorial to her moms and dads, who died in the 1940s. Remarkably, the perform that is below today was only fifty percent of that which was planned, for the two home windows in the opposite window are comprehensive of clear glass, but would have been intended for home windows themed for St Mark and St John.
The transept includes a bronze art nouveau memorial to the younger Arthur Rope, made by Dorothy Rope, his sister. She was also dependable for the war memorial exterior. One more Rope cousin, Ellen Rope, built the lovely, sentimental aid of the Adoration of the Shepherds, but this has now been hidden absent in the vestry which replaced the kid’s corner in the 2006 reordering. The transept also incorporates memorials to the Garretts, such as the mural monument to Richard Garrett, who is buried exterior the south door beneath one particular of the solid iron memorials his foundry made. The triptych of the Blessed Virgin and boy or girl with Leiston Abbey in the history was by the Marquis d’Oisy, whose perform can be found elsewhere in East Anglia at Thaxted in Essex. On the south side, the transept consists of the extended rood beam mounted unwell-advisedly in the late 19th Century, the removal of which can only have been a relief.
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 many such parts in Suffolk of a feature he was wholly in sympathy with. An intriguing element is the stained glass in the little window earlier mentioned his altar. It depicts St Edward the Confessor and St Anne. It was mounted below in the 1930s, and at to start with sight seems to be as if it could be the work of anyone like FC Eden, and then you observe the meticulously drawn sad faces, the chequerboard floors, the minimal-walled backgrounds, so usual of East Anglian figures of the late 15th Century. They are, in short, remarkably articulate figures, and I could not help questioning if they could have been built by Cautley himself. The only recorded glass by Cautley was at the authentic 1920s church of All Hallows in Ipswich, now the church corridor to its significantly much larger 1930s alternative. The subjects of the glass there were being not observed, and it has since disappeared. Is it beyond likelihood that this is the glass from the primary All Hallows, reframed and reset right here by Cautley when he was constructing the new church there, and this small chapel listed here?
It would not be true to say that the early 20th Century embellishment, and the early 21st Century reordering, have completely dispelled Lamb’s gloom, for that would be tricky in these types of a broad area. But the church appears lighter and hotter than when I initial visited it 20 a long time back, and I could not assist questioning how excellent it would be if the south transept windows could be finished to match individuals in the north transept, potentially by another significant excellent East Anglian lady artist? Pippa Blackhall springs to thoughts, if the PCC has any funds.
Perhaps it is acceptable that Lamb, a maverick architect, made this maverick church in this article, since Leiston is a most curious spot. You get there from what is likely the wildest aspect of Suffolk, whichever way you enter it, to obtain on your own briefly surrounded by pink brick terraces, council estates and flyovers. And then, you are out in the countryside once more.
The most important procuring street is, obviously, all 19th and 20th century, and has the truly feel of a miners’ city in the north about it. The trouble with towns that only have one particular employer, of system, is what occurs when that one employer closes, which is exactly what transpired to Garretts in the 1970s. Then, Leiston actually did grow to be like a miners town. The good salvation to the locals was the Sizewell nuclear electricity station, which stands a mile or so to the east of Leiston, and employs just about most people in it.
A fantastic curiosity is the way that Leiston life in symbiosis with Aldeburgh, a town of just about accurately the similar population just a few miles absent. Aldeburgh, as you may perhaps know, is one of Suffolk’s poshest, classiest cities. Leiston, and allow us be frank below, is not. It is as if a usual town had been break up in two, a person portion holding the massive properties, wine bars and designer clothing stores, the other maintaining the blue collar estates, working men’s clubs and field. And yet it is Leiston which has a single of the country’s most extraordinary testimonies to High Victorian Gothic, and to the Arts and Crafts movement.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-04-11 19:25:03
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