The place name ‘Malden’ is, we are told, derived from the Old English terms mael and dune, where mael refers to an image or picture, and dune to a hill. But in the devout country which England had become by the ninth or tenth centuries, one image above all was dominant: the image of Christ. So quite possibly the name Mael-dun was understood to mean not simply ‘The hill with the image’, but rather ‘The hill with the image of Christ’. And whatever form that image took, St. John’s church today presumably stands on its site.
On the day I visited, the church was closed and I was unable to go inside, which was a pity because I very much wanted to see how its interesting history expresses itself. This is a medieval church, significantly modified in the seventeenth century; and again in the 1860s in a spirit of medieval revivalism; and again in the 1870s when a whole new nave and chancel were built to the north of the originals, which were thereby relegated to the status of aisle and side-chapel.
And there were more changes in recent years when a further modern northern extension was added.
But despite all these transformations, it is just possible that a fragment of the original Saxon church has survived. On the outer south wall of the original chancel there is a rough arc of stones which seems to signal an old doorway, long blocked up. Its triangular head hints at Saxon work.
Pevsner, who is usually quick to pick up on tenuous traces such as this, has nothing to say about it; but absence of discussion does not mean that there is nothing to discuss.
For now, therefore, we should add St John the Baptist, Old Malden, to our select group of South London Domesday churches which might, perhaps, retain a thousand-year old scrap of Saxon fabric.
SOURCES:
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South, London, 1983.
The church of St John the Evangelist sits alongside the green at Old Coulsdon, on high ground overlooking the valley to the west which carries the Brighton Road, and Caterham Valley to the east which carries the old Roman Road to Lewes. In 1086 the manor belonged to St Peter’s Abbey at Chertsey. The Domesday Book says ”Ipsa abbatia ten Colesdone”, “The Abbey holds Coulsdon itself”, meaning that the Abbey was the final owner, and did not merely hold the manor on behalf, or at the discretion, of some other lord.
As is usually the case, although Domesday tells us that a Saxon church stood at Coulsdon, no physical remains of it have been found. Excavators working inside the church in the 1970s, investigating the area under the choir stalls in the chancel, hoped that they might discover something, but were disappointed. But the area they excavated was very small, so their failure was no great surprise. There is no reason to doubt that a Saxon church once stood on, or very near, the site of the present church.
At the heart of St John’s today, therefore, is a later medieval church, to which has been added a large 1950s modernist-Gothic extension.
Our interest, of course, is focused on the medieval heart.
The 1970s excavation found possible foundations for a chancel arch which may date to the twelfth century, which in turn suggests that the original Saxon church was first replaced by a Norman one. But the oldest fabric which confronts us today dates from a century later, not Norman in style but early Gothic, erected as part of a major re-building overseen by Chertsey Abbey. Most of this work is concentrated in the chancel: the blank arcade;
and the three sedilia, priest-seats, carved as a single composition on the south side of the sanctuary, accompanied by a small piscina to wash the communion vessels.
Here as in so many other ancient churches, the spell lies in the detail.
‘Bermondsey’ is a no-nonsense Anglo-Saxon placename, combining a personal name, Beormund, with the Old English ‘eye’ / ‘eyot’ / ‘ait’ meaning ‘small island’. Beormund was presumably a local chief or bigwig and this was his place, Beormund’s Isle, Bermondsey. A reminder that in early medieval times much of the south bank of the Thames was a morass of marshes and creeks with an archipelago of large and small islands.
In this series of visits to South London’s Domesday churches, we usually have no idea how old the churches were when they were recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. There have been odd exceptions, such as St. Mary-at-Lambeth – but St Mary is unusual in that it was founded by a member of the royal family, which increased the chances that its origin would be recorded and that the records would survive. Generally however, we are ignorant. Most of the first churches on the sites we have visited might have been established at any time between the seventh and eleventh centuries, a span of four hundred years.
With Bermondsey, however, we have a date. Thanks to surviving correspondence between a Pope in Rome and a monk in South London, we know that the first Bermondsey church was in existence by the early eighth century, 708-715. At this time Lundenwic, the riverside trading settlement at Aldwych and Covent Garden, was thriving, and south-east England was dominated by the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, based in the Midlands. Presumably this is why the Bermondsey foundation, probably a minster, was linked to a monastery at Peterborough in the Mercian heartland. Its buildings would have spilled out to the south of the church where Bermondsey Square, with its regular market, sits today.
Minsters were a regular feature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, clerical communities and evangelising centres from which priests went out into the countryside. But the Norman conquest, three centuries later, signalled a change. In 1086 the Domesday Book recorded a “beautiful new church”, nova et pulchra æccla, at Bermondsey. This new church was part of a wider programme of re-establishing the institution along new lines. The old minster was transformed into a Cluniac priory, becoming part of a powerful monastic order which enjoyed the special protection of the Pope. Perhaps the new church was regarded by the Domesday commissioners as “beautiful” because it was built in the Norman style, massive stone and mighty Romanesque arches, just like its mother church at Cluny in France.
In time Bermondsey Priory was promoted to become an Abbey, but in the sixteenth century this provided no protection once the programme of monastic dissolution took hold. The Abbey was closed in the 1530s and most of its buildings were demolished to make way for a fine house for the new landowner. Only the church survived, re-purposed yet again, no longer serving the Abbey but instead serving the local parish.
Late in the following century the medieval church was largely demolished and a new one built to a design by Charles Stanton. Stanton was a Southwark carpenter and architect. He took Christopher Wren’s City church of St Martin Ludgate as his model, and the interior still carries a seventeenth century flavour: high white plaster groin vaults and crossings; polished woodwork; the reredos bearing the Lord’s Prayer.
But the exterior is another matter. In the 1830s Stanton’s west end exterior was monstrously reinvented by George Porter. I have written about this before because Porter is an important figure in Penge, where he designed the iconic, eccentric, delightful Watermen’s Almshouses in the 1840s. But this earlier project at St Mary Magdalen in Bermondsey is, in my opinion, far from delightful.
Pevsner describes Porter’s west front as “a gimcrack but charming, wholly unscholarly Gothic revival”, which is, I think, remarkably charitable. To my eye it is awkward and ugly: the weirdly sloping battlements; the cartoon-sketch lantern on the tower; the stucco modelled to resemble breeze blocks. The overall effect is cheerfully, confidently horrible. But never forget that behind Porter’s graceless street frontage is Stanton’s delicate, balanced, poised interior.
The church building at St. John the Baptist, West Wickham, is not, in my view, particularly striking. Much of the visible fabric dates back no further than the 1840s, although there are some older internal features, and windows, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
But what is intriguing about St John’s is not the building, but the site, neatly crowning a small but prominent hill.
This is a Domesday church, so we know that by the eleventh century the location had been chosen to serve a social and sacred function. But the history of the wider landscape suggests that this particular hill-top has a story which reaches back much further.
Today, the land below the church to the west and north-west is farmland, playing-fields and woodland. But two thousand years ago this was a vicus, a small Roman town sitting alongside the Roman road from London to Lewes (on which see the previous post here).
In fact the name ‘West Wickham’ carries within it a memory of that Roman town: the ‘wic’ element, which crops up in many English place-names, often signifying a market or port, is an Old English loan-term from the Latin ‘vicus’.
Brian Philp, the archaeologist whose work over many years revealed the town’s existence, believed it to be Noviomagus, a lost settlement long known to have existed but whose precise location was a topic of longstanding debate. Philp’s talent and industry as an archaeologist are beyond doubt, but I disagree with him about Noviomagus: I have argued here that Charlton has a better claim to the name than West Wickham. But that does not alter the fact that there was a Roman town at West Wickham, sitting on an important Roman road, parts of which can still be walked.
Which brings us back to the hill, because I suspect that today’s church may be the successor to a Roman sacred site, and perhaps other earlier Iron Age or Bronze Age sites before it. We know that early Christian churches were sometimes built in places with long histories of religious significance: Knowlton church in Dorset, and Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, are two classic examples. We know that this was a busy place in the Roman period, a small town associated with the London to Lewes road. We know that Roman towns had temples and religious buildings. And we know that the hill was a prominent point in the landscape, an obvious candidate for a symbolic architectural statement – then as now. Given all this, I would be surprised if the site of St John’s church did not have a history stretching back beyond the Christian era.
Further reading: Brian Philp, ‘Lost Roman town discovered at West Wickham’, in Kent Archaeological Review 141, 2000.
We know rather more about the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Lambeth (aka St Mary-at-Lambeth) than is usual for Domesday churches. For most of them, the Domesday Book entry is the earliest record of their existence, and we have no idea when they were first built – eleventh century? tenth? ninth? – or by whom. But for St Mary-at-Lambeth we have a story.
In the middle decades of the eleventh century it seems that the manor of North Lambeth was held by Goda, Countess of Boulogne and sister to the English king Edward the Confessor. At this time, directly across the Thames on Thorney Island, Edward was busily building a new stone church in the fashionable Norman style, to serve the island’s Benedictine monastery. In doing so he was laying the foundations of a new royal zone in the west, a counter-balance to the largely self-governing city of London to the east. His new church was dedicated to St Peter, and came to be known as the West Minster, in contrast to St Paul’s, the East Minster, in the city.
It is tempting to see the founding of St Mary-at-Lambeth as a sisterly gesture of support by Countess Goda for her brother’s efforts. The site faced Westminster across the river. It was close to the location of the reputed ford, and later to the horse ferry, still remembered in Horseferry Road on the opposite bank, which perhaps succeeded the ford. So it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that the first St Mary’s was envisaged as a south-bank extension of Edward’s works. A century later, the Archbishop of Canterbury recognised the site’s convenience as a point of access to London’s centres of power when he acquired land right next door and on it built Lambeth Palace.
And yet, despite standing beside the Archbishop’s palace, St Mary’s ceased to function as a church half a century ago. It closed in 1972, and in 1979 was rescued by the Tradescant Trust, named for a family of pioneering seventeenth century gardeners, to embark on a new career as the Garden Museum. For those of us interested primarily in its character as a church building, this is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, its role as a museum has secured the building’s existence which might otherwise have been in doubt. On the other, the interior is now quite properly organised as a museum, and its original identity as a church is, if not lost, then certainly muted.
The oldest parts of the fabric date from the late fourteenth century, when Goda’s building was replaced. The fourteenth century church was altogether larger and more ambitious than its predecessor, its five-bay nave “nobly proportioned” according to Pevsner.
This was the period of mature Gothic, when much of the creativity of church architecture was focused on windows and light; improved skills in engineering and glass-making made possible ever-larger windows, whose stained glass lit interiors to stunning effect. In the late fourteenth century the daring window tracery of the ‘Decorated’ style was giving way to the even more radical designs of the ‘Perpendicular’. But in the case of St Mary’s, we cannot be sure what its fourteenth century windows looked like, because they were removed and replaced in the nineteenth century, when the architect Philip Hardwick put in new windows to his own design.
Hardwick’s restoration was not confined to the windows, a drastic re-build rather than a careful restoration. But one major medieval feature survives: the solid and impressive south-west tower.
It still stands, and can still be climbed, so long as you don’t suffer from claustrophobia.
From the top, you have access to some wonderful views along and across the River Thames.
Hardly surprising that this is where Wenceslas Hollar stood almost four hundred years ago: St Mary’s tower was one of the high points he used for a series of bird’s-eye panoramas of London from the 1640s to the 1660s. But Hollar was a master of imaginative deception; the detail below shows the church in the bottom right-hand corner with Lambeth Palace peeping out behind, as if the artist were looking down on his own vantage point. And its proximity to Westminster is clear, with the bulk of the Abbey – not yet marked by the two west towers which we know today – clearly visible across the Thames.
Hence, I suspect, the reason for building the first St Mary’s in the last years of Anglo-Saxon England.
SOURCES
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, Penguin Books, London, 1994.
Survey of London, Volume 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall, London County Council, 1951.
The Domesday Book records a chapel at Streatham, and we must assume that St. Leonard’s church today stands in the same place as that Saxon chapel. We must assume it, firstly, because re-building on an already-consecrated site was the usual practice; and secondly because the site itself is rather fine.
Streatham means “village or farm by the street”, the street in question being the Roman road from London to Brighton. Streatham High Road follows its course, and the church stands beside and above it, looking down upon it as it climbs up from Norbury and turns, swinging east to re-align itself towards Brixton Hill.
There may have been a Roman building – perhaps a posting station, or a shrine – centuries before the Saxon chapel, which would account for the Roman coins from the late-third to mid-fourth centuries which have been found here. But whatever its status in the Roman period, this site was the core of the village from Saxon times to the nineteenth century, and its importance as a meeting place is still remembered in the quintessentially modern form of a bad-tempered four-way road junction.
The oldest surviving fabric of St. Leonard’s church is seen in the lower layers of the west tower, the west door, and the arch within, all of which date from the fourteenth century.
Much of the rest is more recent, resulting from a series of changes over the last couple of centuries. The first renovation, in the 1830s, remodelled the nave and installed galleries supported by columns of fashionable cast-iron. The second, in the 1860s, rebuilt and enlarged the chancel. But in the 1970s a disastrous fire swept away much of this work, and more besides.
There was no choice but to embark on a third renovation, producing the church we see today. Pevsner actually prefers it to the church as it was before the fire, which seems rather barbaric. However, I do see the point, because although some of the repaired exterior has a decidedly utilitarian look, the interior – which is, after all, what matters – is lovely.
There is a sense of air and space, a lightness, and a calm, about the place – quite astonishing given that it stands within yards of one of London’s busiest roads. The generous use of wood contributes to this quietness,
as do the whitewashed walls, and the modern stained-glass, which includes a pictorial history of Streatham.
Perhaps my liking for St. Leonard’s reflects a personal bias, because this church does have a special significance for me. I was born about a mile away, and was christened here, in this medieval church, on the site of a Saxon chapel, next to a Roman road. Where better?
SOURCES
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, Penguin Books, London, 1994, p. 390-1.
Ireneo Grosso, St. Leonard’s Church, Streatham High Road, London SW16 1HS: An Archaeological Watching Brief, Pre-Construct Archaeology, London, 2019.
St. Peter’s church at Petersham, just outside Richmond, overlooking the Thames, has a fascinating history to which today’s building fails to do justice. Pevsner thinks it “charming” but I have to disagree. The district of Petersham contains mansions built for the gentry and aristocrats of the eighteenth century, and at first sight we might be forgiven for supposing that the church itself was of a similar age, a prim red-brick structure of neo-classical appearance. But its bizarre shape hints at something more complex, for this church is wider than it is long, its nave and chancel dwarfed by its transepts.
But even if the building does not appear to be ancient, the site is: today’s church is the third to stand here. The first was Anglo-Saxon, and is recorded in the Domesday Book where the place-name is given as Patricesham. As usual with Saxon churches, we have no idea when or by whom it was built. We do know however that in the seventh century this area was granted by Frithuwold, a ‘sub-king’ of the Mercian king Wulfhere, to Chertsey Abbey. The charter which sets this out is famous for being the first known document to refer to ‘Surrey’ – although the precise location, extent and status of this seventh century ‘Surrey’ are all unclear.
No trace of the Saxon church survives; it was replaced after the Conquest by a second building, put up in the twelfth and/or thirteenth century. The sole remaining visible relic of this medieval phase is a blocked-up lancet window on the north side of the chancel.
The window dates to the late thirteenth century, which gives us a terminus ante quem, a latest possible date, for construction of the church as a whole.
By this time Petersham church had become a token, a playing-piece in ecclesiastical power-games. Since the seventh century the manor – and presumably the church – had belonged to Chertsey Abbey, a connection which was confirmed in the Domesday Book in the eleventh century. But some time after this the church was re-designated as a chapel belonging to the important church at Kingston. And then in the thirteenth century Kingston itself, together with the Petersham chapel, was acquired by the increasingly powerful and acquisitive Priory at Merton.
This arrangement continued for three hundred years and was still in place in 1505 when the medieval church was largely demolished and replaced by the third church. It is unclear what prompted this: the early sixteenth century was not a particularly busy time for parish church renovation. But as things turned out, Petersham’s new church was probably one of the last built in Catholic England; less than forty years later Merton Priory was swept away by the Reformation, and the former chapel embarked on a new career as an Anglican parish church.
The church built in 1505 forms the core of the building which stands today. But it has been continually added to, and eventually overwhelmed, by numerous extensions in the seventeenth century (new south transept and west tower), eighteenth century (new north transept) and nineteenth century (south transept enlarged, north transept heightened). Hence the building we see today, which contrives somehow to be both prim and eccentric.
SOURCES
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, Penguin Books, London, 1994, p. 514.
John Cloake, Richmond Past, Historical Publications, London, 1991.
A few yards from the west door of the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Merton Park, is a rather fine stone gateway. It now stands in the wall of the churchyard, but for centuries it did service about a mile to the east, at Merton Priory. Its zig-zag carving, classically Norman, is still sharp and clear; Pevsner describes it lovingly as “sumptuous”. Merton Priory is long gone, demolished in the sixteenth century, its old site now occupied by a retail park and residential streets. But somehow the Norman gateway survived, and when it was discovered in 1914 a new home for it was found at St. Mary’s church.
The Domesday Book recorded the existence of an Anglo-Saxon church here in 1086. No physical trace of it survives; it was replaced by a new Norman church early in the twelfth century. According to some sources, the prime mover in this was Gilbert, an influential local figure who was also the driving force behind the establishment of Merton Priory. From this point on, as the Priory grew in size and wealth, it and the church were closely connected.
In its first phase, the new St. Mary’s was a sizeable but simple two-cell stone structure of nave and chancel; to this day the footprint of the nave is the same, although its original Norman character has been obscured by later alterations. The most significant of these was the addition of north and south aisles in the nineteenth century, which saw the old nave walls replaced by arcades of pointed arches, thus giving the whole church a spuriously Gothic rather than Norman feel.
But there are some recognisably Norman surviving features: a north door, its zig-zag pattern sadly damaged during the nineteenth century alterations; and a round-arched window (now containing nineteenth-century stained glass) just inside the west door.
In the thirteenth century as style shifted from Norman Romanesque to Early English Gothic, the east end of the church was extended. An ambitious new chancel was built, surprisingly long, four substantial bays defined by pointed blank arches
and pierced by lancet windows.
Around 1400 the chancel acquired an impressive hammerbeam roof.
Like the extended chancel itself, this roof would have been an expensive project, carried out by highly skilled craftsmen, made possible by the church’s association with the prosperous Priory nearby.
To sum up: there was an Anglo-Saxon church on this site, but the St. Mary’s that we encounter today belongs to a different world, steeped in the culture and wealth of post-Conquest medievalism and Christendom.
SOURCES:
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, Penguin Books, London, 1994, pp. 437-8.
The uplands of Farthing Down at Coulsdon were productive enough to be cultivated in the Bronze and Iron Ages, but by the end of the Roman era, as Germanic settlers dribbled in, the soil had become depleted. Consequently Anglo-Saxon Chaldon was never populous, but neither was it unimportant.
The Down ridge provided a last resting-place for several pagan worthies, buried in mounds or tumuli. And in the seventh century, as Christianity took root, Chaldon was acquired by Chertsey Abbey, a claim confirmed by King Edgar in the tenth century, and again by King Edward the Confessor a century later. After the Norman takeover, it was part of the vast territories bestowed on Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother and right-hand man to King William. By this time a church had been built here – we don’t know when – which was recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086.
The present, lovely church of St. Peter and St. Paul is not, materially, the building noted in Domesday; but it is, mostly, that building’s immediate successor, and almost certainly stands upon the same ground.
Much of the fabric of the present church dates to the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, representing a building process which spanned a century or more. We can identify that process from a few subtle clues. For instance the window high up on the west wall is early Norman, earlier than the other windows.
Inside, the capital of the south pier
is earlier than that of the north pier;
and the nave and chancel are earlier than the north and south aisles.
Intriguingly, there was once a chapel at the north-east corner – as in the Anglo-Saxon churches at St. Paul’s Cray and Orpington – whose blocked-up door can still be seen on the chancel wall.
And finally, the nicely proportioned tower with its spire at the south-west corner which, to my eye, completes the composition, is not medieval at all, but early Victorian.
But we have not yet touched on Chaldon’s glory: the Doom, the wonderful wall-painting revealed in 1870, having survived three centuries or more under coats of pious whitewash. In its scale, and preservation, and raw power, it is astonishing.
The painting dates from about 1200, and represents the ‘Ladder of Salvation’, on which some souls manage to clamber up to Heaven, while others tumble into the clutches of devils down in Hell. It is starkly divided into four quarters, bisected horizontally by Heaven above and Hell below, and vertically by the Ladder. The Ladder thus represents the material world itself, with mortal life reduced to a brief prelude either to eternal bliss or agonies without end.
There is a tendency to damn the Chaldon Doom with faint praise: writers suggest that it is ‘important rather than beautiful’ (Nairn & Pevsner), or ‘gauche, yet vital’ (Jenkins), or ‘of minimal artistic value, but interesting’ (Clifton-Taylor). But these judgments are beside the point, for the Doom was never intended to be beautiful, let alone a work of art. It was intended to be terrifying, a stark existential warning, and its stylistic simplicity is part of its purpose. Its lack of adornment or colour; its plain white figures on an ochre ground; its geometric quartering of eternity; its cold relish in depicting the horrors of Hell; its equally unemotional depiction of the bliss of Heaven; all combine to produce a bleak and unforgiving representation of a bleak and unforgiving theology.
Sources
Alec Clifton-Taylor, English Parish Churches as Works of Art, Batsford, London, 1974.
K.F.N. Flynn, ‘The mural painting in the church of Saints Peter & Paul, Chaldon, Surrey’ in Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 72, 1980.
Stephen C. Humphrey, Churches & Chapels of Southern England, A. & C. Black, London, 1991.
Simon Jenkins, England’s Thousand Best Churches, Penguin, London, 2000.
Ian Nairn & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Surrey, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962.
Rivers have always been magnets for human activity: barriers, highways, sources of water, food, energy, and plants with a thousand uses. Hence the endless busyness, going back millennia, in the landscape around Beddington, just west of Croydon on the River Wandle.
Over the years archaeologists have found traces of Bronze Age ditches; a Roman villa under the sewage works to the north of the river; a Roman lead coffin found on the south side which is now housed in the church; and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries on both sides of the river, with a tenth-century coin of King Aethelstan to the north, and burials to the south which date back another four or five hundred years, to the first period of Germanic settlement.
The place-name may derive from the Old English ‘bedd’ meaning, predictably, a bed. This led in the past to antiquarian speculation that the original village offered accommodation for travellers on Stane Street, the old Roman road, which was believed to pass close by. This notion of an Anglo-Saxon hotel or coaching-inn is beguiling, but unlikely, because Stane Street was not close by. Its nearest approach was at Cheam, about four miles to the west. The Roman road to Brighton was closer, though even that was about two miles away as it passed through Croydon Old Town.
Whether or not it could boast an hotel, we know that Anglo-Saxon Beddington had a church, which is recorded in the Domesday Book. A hundred years ago the Reverend Thomas Bentham argued that this church must have been standing by the late ninth century because Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, died at Beddington in 894. Bentham thought that a bishop was unlikely to visit a village unless it had a church, so there must have been a church at Beddington at the time of his visit, during which he unfortunately died. I’m not convinced. This argument seems to me to assume that the church in Saxon Wessex a thousand years ago, at a time of recent war against the Danes followed by an armed truce, operated along similar lines to the suburban Anglicanism of the 1920s, with gracious episcopal visitations to diocesan churches. I do not believe that we can fix the date of Beddington’s Saxon church any more precisely than to say that it must have existed by the late eleventh century in order to be recorded in Domesday.
However, it is generally accepted that this Domesday church was on the same site as the present church, just south of the Wandle. The present church is described pithily in Pevsner’s 1960s guide to Surrey as “Perp throughout”. This is not quite true: its style is very largely Perpendicular, but it is also significantly Victorian, each reflecting a moment of rebuilding and renovation, one orchestrated by local lord Sir Nicholas Carew in the late fourteenth century, and the other by local priest Canon Alexander Bridges in the nineteenth. Both men were wealthy, and it shows; St. Mary’s is unusually large and impressive for the size of the parish which it serves.
The Perpendicular style is best known for its large windows with shallow pointed arches, with stone mullions and metal tracery often containing panes of stained glass. The confidence, the audacity, to construct such windows derived from a sophisticated appreciation of the load-bearing capacities of the pointed arch, and its ability to direct and manage great downward stress even when the wall beneath consisted largely of glass.
Carew’s project was ambitious, but he was not starting from scratch. He was essentially re-modelling a Norman church which in his day was already about two hundred years old. Just as nothing remains of the original Saxon church, so little survives of this Norman successor – except the font, squat and solid on its sturdy pillars, harking back defiantly to an era before pointed arches and painted glass.
Canon Bridges’ nineteenth century work was mainly, and predictably, inspired by romantic medievalism. I say this not as criticism, but in affectionate appreciation. For instance, the extensive Victorian painting on walls and pillars and ceiling on and beyond the chancel arch is wonderful, rich in colour and detail. We cannot know if this is how the original medieval church looked, but this is surely how it ought to have looked.
To conclude: the first church at Beddington was built in Anglo-Saxon times, recorded in the Domesday Book, and stood on the south bank of the River Wandle in a landscape which had been settled for thousands of years. It was close to the sites of one or more pre-Christian cemeteries. No physical fabric from this Saxon church survives, but the present-day church is in the same place, and to that extent bears witness to it, and to the continuity of a human presence in this place.
SOURCES
John Addy (1874), ‘Account of a Roman villa lately discovered at Beddington, Surrey’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 6.
Anon (1792), The Environs of London, T. Cadell and W. Davies, London.
Rev. Thomas Bentham (1923), A History of Beddington, John Murray, London.
John Wickham Flower (1874), ‘Notices of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Beddington, Surrey’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 6.
H,E. Malden (ed.) (1912), A History of the County of Surrey vol. 4, Victoria County History, London.
Ian Nairn & Nikolaus Pevsner (1962), The Buildings of England: Surrey, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Sarah Porteus et al. (2019), ‘Archaeological investigations at the former George Payne Ltd site, 57 Croydon Road, Beddington’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 102.
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