St Margaret, Leiston, Suffolk
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If you are seeking for grand 19th Century church buildings, you should not come to Suffolk. Outside the house the four huge towns, there are hardly any. The key exception to this usually drinking water-restricted rule is Suffolk’s most major 19th Century church, Edward Buckton Lamb’s St Margaret, Leiston, and there are unusual factors for it getting what it is – unconventional in Suffolk, in any case. In the 1780s, the inhabitants of Leiston was about 400, creating it a relatively typical middle-sized East Anglian village community of the time. But then, Richard Garrett expanded his Woodbridge blacksmith’s shop by opening an engineering will work in Leiston, and men and women flooded into Leiston from all in excess of the location. The Garretts and the Ropes are two family members whose names solid a extensive shadow in excess of this town, and are vividly remembered listed here in this church, as we will see.
The Garretts designed agricultural equipment, rivals to their similarly dynamic neighbours the Ransomes of Ipswich. Numerous of the ploughs and harrows that tamed the British Empire were forged in Leiston and Ipswich. By the 1850s, the population of the village had achieved 2,000. And by the early 20th century, it was around 4,000, a a lot more than ten-fold improve in a minimal above a hundred decades, unparalleled in a county where, by and significant, the Industrial Revolution was something that took place to other folks.
It grew to become apparent in that remarkable age of religion, the 1850s, that the medieval predecessor of St Margaret was merely not large adequate any much more. We know that it was a prolonged, skinny church. A contemporary report describes it as ‘like to currently being in a tunnel’, not unusual in east Suffolk, despite the fact that St Margaret was for a longer period than most at 128 feet. Lamb’s quick was to build a huge, 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, due to the fact the Vicar of St Margaret was a firebrand preacher, the Reverend J.C. Blathwayt, quite a great deal towards 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 Movement for authorised architects, who had been developing in the good English medieval manner. Lamb was by no means a single of these, which is likely why he was picked out here. He was a maverick, who ploughed a lonely furrow, mixing and matching and normally reinventing in the Substantial Gothic method. His only other do the job in Suffolk is at Braiseworth, now redundant. His structure for St Margaret was innovative – or, at least, his execution of it, for he transformed the strategies as he went along, and thoroughly disregarded the limited finances he had been saddled with. The new church was aligned in the exact same route as the outdated one particular, and was of roughly the same length, but in a most uncommon form with a extensive central crossing and shorter transepts each and every wider than the nave itself.
If you had occur right here in the last ten years of the 20th Century as, for the first time, I did, you would have located the creating loaded with rather sombre mid-Victorian pews, the weakest aspect of the entire church, and no surprise, for Lamb experienced them manufactured of the most inexpensive 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 flooring has been carpeted, the pews changed with contemporary chairs. The nave and transept seating faces to 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 notable in Suffolk of all big 19th Century architects, Sir Arthur Blomfield. But the best and most exceptional functions of the church are after Blathwayt’s time. In 1874, he was succeeded by Father Berney Wodehouse Raven, who cleverly and carefully launched large Anglo-catholic practice right here. All through the class of his ministry, and that of his successor Father Roe, and then in the many years later on, the aspects of this church that make it so singular discovered their house in this article.
Lamb experienced foreshortened the chancel considerably, the fantastic east window drawn ahead to impose alone. In the 1890s this was stuffed with glass remembering Mary Ann Garrett, the saints depicted currently being preferred in the late 19th Century Substantial Church custom. Mary Ann is depicted in her outdated age as as St Felicity, the remaining figure, the full piece the operate of Kempe & Co, not a workshop I’m a fantastic lover of, but this is seriously pretty very good. 6 candles sat on the retable powering the substantial altar, which need to have experienced the Reverend Blathwayt spinning nicely in his grave, for this parish embraced wholeheartedly the Anglo-catholic motion in the early a long time of the 20th Century. The walls were being adorned, vine stencilling climbs the inside of the chancel arch, the room previously mentioned the crossing disappearing into a mystical gloom. This was enhanced by Lamb’s most impressive characteristic, a roof that seems to be like a mathematical puzzle, and was either influenced by, or a joke at the expenditure of, the well known medieval roofs of Suffolk.
The most placing factors of this church’s 20th Century elaboration are virtually solely the work of just one spouse and children, the Ropes, whose home windows and reliefs are found in numerous church buildings in Suffolk, as effectively as churches and cathedrals all around the entire world. They lived in this parish, and in the north transept, we discover the very best hour of Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope (‘Tor’ to her family members – you can see her tortoise symbol on the appropriate hand side). Set up in 1959, the windows keep in mind Tor’s mother and father and a community health practitioner. The left hand window shows scenes from the Gospel of St Luke. The proper hand window, with the concept of St Matthew, is a memorial to her moms and dads, who died in the 1940s. Remarkably, the perform that is right here nowadays was only 50 % of that which was planned, for the two home windows in the reverse window are whole of crystal clear glass, but would have been intended for windows themed for St Mark and St John.
The transept contains a bronze art nouveau memorial to the younger Arthur Rope, intended by Dorothy Rope, his sister. She was also responsible for the war memorial outdoors. One more Rope cousin, Ellen Rope, intended the beautiful, sentimental reduction of the Adoration of the Shepherds, but this has now been concealed away in the vestry which replaced the kid’s corner in the 2006 reordering. The transept also includes memorials to the Garretts, together with the mural monument to Richard Garrett, who is buried exterior the south doorway beneath 1 of the forged iron memorials his foundry created. The triptych of the Blessed Virgin and little one with Leiston Abbey in the track record was by the Marquis d’Oisy, whose work can be located in other places in East Anglia at Thaxted in Essex. On the south aspect, the transept contains the very long rood beam set up sick-advisedly in the late 19th Century, the elimination of which can only have been a aid.
On the north aspect of the chancel is a sweet little blessed sacrament chapel, its 1930s woodwork the operate of Henry Munro Cautley, diocesan architect at the time and designer of several this sort of pieces in Suffolk of a function he was wholly in sympathy with. An intriguing depth is the stained glass in the tiny window higher than his altar. It depicts St Edward the Confessor and St Anne. It was set up right here in the 1930s, and at initial sight seems to be as if it could be the perform of another person like FC Eden, and then you recognize the carefully drawn unfortunate faces, the chequerboard flooring, the reduced-walled backgrounds, so usual of East Anglian figures of the late 15th Century. They are, in small, remarkably articulate figures, and I could not assist pondering if they may have been intended by Cautley himself. The only recorded glass by Cautley was at the original 1920s church of All Hallows in Ipswich, now the church hall to its much bigger 1930s alternative. The subjects of the glass there have been not famous, and it has because disappeared. Is it further than possibility that this is the glass from the primary All Hallows, reframed and reset here by Cautley when he was developing the new church there, and this minimal chapel right here?
It would not be correct to say that the early 20th Century embellishment, and the early 21st Century reordering, have solely dispelled Lamb’s gloom, for that would be difficult in this kind of a huge place. But the church seems lighter and warmer than when I very first visited it 20 several years ago, and I could not aid pondering how superb it would be if the south transept windows could be concluded to match all those in the north transept, perhaps by one more significant high-quality East Anglian woman artist? Pippa Blackhall springs to head, if the PCC has any money.
Most likely it is appropriate that Lamb, a maverick architect, designed this maverick church listed here, mainly because Leiston is a most curious location. You get there from what is in all probability the wildest element of Suffolk, whichever way you enter it, to find on your own briefly surrounded by crimson brick terraces, council estates and flyovers. And then, you are out in the countryside all over again.
The major browsing avenue is, clearly, all 19th and 20th century, and has the really feel of a miners’ city in the north about it. The problems with cities that only have just one employer, of course, is what takes place when that single employer closes, which is particularly what occurred to Garretts in the 1970s. Then, Leiston really did develop 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 most people in it.
A terrific curiosity is the way that Leiston lives in symbiosis with Aldeburgh, a city of pretty much exactly the very same population just 3 miles absent. Aldeburgh, as you might know, is one particular of Suffolk’s poshest, classiest cities. Leiston, and enable us be frank here, is not. It is as if a typical town had been split in two, just one portion maintaining the massive residences, wine bars and designer clothes shops, the other holding the blue collar estates, functioning men’s clubs and business. And yet it is Leiston which has 1 of the country’s most exceptional testimonies to Superior Victorian Gothic, and to the Arts and Crafts movement.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2019-04-11 19:20:25
Tagged: , Leiston , Suffolk , east Anglia
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