St Peter, Thurston, Suffolk
Thurston is a substantial and occupied village just off of the A14 not much 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 developing that stands upright previously mentioned the street to Pakenham. None of the tough-and-readiness of several of Suffolk’s rural churches in this article, for what you see from the road is solely of the 19th Century.
On this internet site, we have frequently occur throughout the operate of the unfashionable Victorian Suffolk architect Edward Hakewill, son of the additional famed Henry Hakewill. He experienced worked extensively in Suffolk the 1860s, and is often excellent, 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 work of his lesser-recognised youthful brother, John Henry Hakewill, and I was intrigued to see what he experienced got up to.
His brother Edward’s usual method was to go in, create a north aisle, minimize the interior furnishings to a polite center-brow sacramentalism, and then leave. John Hakewill had fairly a lot more than that to do below, due to the fact of one thing that occurred on the evening of Sunday March 18th 1860. In frequent with most Suffolk churches, St Peter had been considerably neglected by way of the 18th and early 19th Generations, and its will need for a facelift had develop into apparent. In reality, John Hakewill had presently been engaged as the architect for a thorough going-about of the aged framework. But shortly ahead of midnight, supposedly on the night in advance of function was owing to commence, the tower fell.
It is really hard to think about the effect of an incident like that on a small, remote, rural local community. The a person long-lasting, ageless framework in its midst out of the blue disappeared overnight. The tower collapsed straight down, but slipping rubble took out the nave and aisle roofs, as perfectly as destroying piers of the two arcades. The parishioners decided to do the clear, and retreat into the chancel for solutions. On the other hand, just ten days afterwards, the rest of the nave collapsed, bringing down what remained of the arcades and roofs, and destroying all the furnishings, which includes the pulpit and lectern.
And so, a choice was designed to rebuild from scratch, accommodating the new church to the surviving chancel and porch. As Roy Tricker points out, Hakewill was quite much of the prevailing view of the time that Adorned was the only appropriate design for a medieval church (in spite of the fact that Suffolk’s finest moments are primarily Perpendicular), and, as a Bury Put up short article of the time famous, Hakewill was decided that the new church really should be totally in Adorned and accurate architecture, replacing the inferior architecture in the aged structure.
And so, there it is today. The exterior is definitely remarkable, and the church reopened barely 18 months later, at the cost of about £3,500, about 3 quarters of a million in modern income, an extraordinary discount I would have considered. This will have to have been a massive church, even just before Hakewill’s rebuild – I puzzled if it had been a match for Rougham, throughout the A14. A lot of the chancel seems reasonably primary, in spite of considerable patching up. The imposing tower alone is beginning to mellow with age, while maybe it still bears a disconcerting similarity to what might be the tower of a Commonly English Village Church in a product village, many thanks to Hakewill’s insistence on ‘correct’ Dec. But when you take into account what Richard Phipson did throughout the street at Finborough and Woolpit in the course of the exact decade, St Peter may have bought off lightly.
You phase into a large, tidy house total of light – no gloomy north aise in this article. Inevitably, there is an city truly feel to the wholly 19th Century inside, while there are some earlier survivals. 1 of these is the font, a high-quality perpendicular piece whose foliage panels conceal a eco-friendly man or two. Can it have appear from listed here at first? It is tricky to see how the font could have survived the collapse of the tower. Gathered fragments of 15th Century glass include things like a selection of placing heads, as very well as components of the figures of a cherubim, a pope and a bishop. Up in the chancel there is what seems to be a pair of tasty medieval angels keeping scrolls, whilst they are, I feel, 19th Century fakes. Certainly 15th Century are the stalls down below, however, which survived the fall of the tower and have pleasant minor figures in the spandrels. There are a few additional medieval benches now put at the west close of the south aisle, also with inexperienced gentlemen on them.
Bringing us ideal up to day is a person of Suffolk’s several sets of royal arms to Queen Elizabeth II (there are many others not considerably off at Rattlesden and Lavenham, between other people). This set is dated 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee. The woodwork in the nave is of a respectable high-quality, presumably mounted as part of the identical fee as the rebuilding, but the reredos in the chancel is somewhat finer, the get the job done of Father Ernest Geldart, the Anglo-catholic carpenter-priest whose parish and studio have been at Little Braxted in Essex. Its fee may perhaps give us some concept of the churchmanship right here at Thurston in the early decades of the 20th Century.
A name that a lot of will associate with Bury St Edmunds is that of the Greene King brewery, and the Greene spouse and children are commemorated listed here at Thurston. Sir Walter Greene compensated for the restoration of the chancel. The memorial windows to the Greene family members are by the stained glass agency Ward & Hughes, and ended up put in over 30 yrs from 1890 to 1920. Ward & Hughes were being a corporation that went by means of three distinctive phases. In their early yrs they ended up generally fairly intriguing, as across the border at Pentney in Norfolk, for instance. Afterwards in the 19th Century they turned one particular of the premier mass-producing workshops in the region, churning out countless numbers of windows for hundreds of churches all over the earth that are mostly of a very similar center-brow excellent. In the 20th Century, on the other hand, the wheels arrived off a little bit, and the home windows fluctuate significantly. There is a emotion that patrons have been given much too significantly say in the design and style, which is often a oversight, and often they can be pretty terrible. But here at Thurston the glass is spectacular. The 1890 glass is unquestionably not operate-of-the-mill, currently being a edition in glass of Axel Ender’s painting Easter Morning. Regardless of whether it is excellent or not is most likely a subject of flavor, 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 equivalent design and style to these previous two up the road at Pakenham.
In other places in the church, the beautiful 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 aged baby, Mary Adelaide Blake, who died in 1842. The day of the new window indicates that the old a person experienced blast damge in the Next Globe War, a prevalent fate for these Suffolk churches surrounded by American air bases. The greatest window in the church, nonetheless, is at the east conclusion of the north aisle, and depicts the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter in a quiet, painterly fashion. It remembers Isabella Blake, who died in 1856, and no person appears to be to know who it is by. Intriguingly, provided that this is also to a daughter of the Blake household, it appears probable that the misplaced window in the south aisle was by the similar workshop.
For numerous years, Thurston church was complicated of entry, so it is pleasing to discover that it is now open up to strangers and pilgrims each day. Even extra, the indicator in the porch asks you to be mindful not to unintentionally lock the doorway on your way out.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2018-02-05 17:51:48
Tagged: , Thurston , suffolk , east Anglia , CHURCH
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