All Saints Carshalton stands prominently above the local High Street, overlooking ponds from which rises the River Wandle. Seen from here it clearly belongs to the nineteenth century, a neo-Gothic parish church of dressed stone and flint, tall windows with complex tracery, the creation of a single mind. The mind in question belonged to Reginald Blomfield, a late Victorian and Edwardian architect mainly known for his country houses and gardens.
Viewed from this vantage point, we might expect that All Saints as a whole is Blomfield’s work, but it isn’t. Walk around to the south side, facing the churchyard, and things look very different. The wall here lacks the uniformity of the north side. It is instead a riot of different materials speaking of a complex history: old stone, newer stone, old brick, newer brick, flint.
Here on the south side, in the quiet of the churchyard, it is clear that All Saints has a story to tell. And given that the Domesday Book records a church at Carshalton (which it referred to as Altoun or ‘Old Town’), we are entitled to suspect that the story has an Anglo-Saxon beginning.
Interpreting any church is an exercise in mental archaeology. This doesn’t mean that we should dig up our ancient churches; it means that we should apply a version of archaeological interpretation when we try to understand them. It means working backwards through time, backwards through the successive phases of their building and alteration, just as archaeologists interpret an excavated site by working backwards through its layers of human presence, the more recent underpinned by the earlier.
At All Saints, the most recent (fifth) phase is Blomfield’s church, built just over a century ago. He was brought in because the old medieval church was in trouble: its northern side was collapsing. But Blomfield’s brief was not just a rescue job: he was also charged with making the whole church much larger, in response to a growing population as Carshalton transformed itself from small Surrey village to busy modern suburb.
Domesday tells us that there was already a church somewhere on this site at the time of the Norman Conquest. We do not know its overall ground-plan, but we believe that it included a tower (first phase). Around 1150, this pre-Conquest church was demolished, except for the tower, and a new nave was built to its west (second phase). After about forty or fifty years a north aisle was built (third phase); and a south aisle, and redesigned chancel effectively sitting beneath the tower, were added some years later (fourth phase). After this, as far as we know, the church’s basic structure remained untouched until Blomfield’s arrival seven hundred years later, though of course there were alterations to windows, fittings, monuments and the like.
Blomfield demolished the north aisle and replaced it not just with a new aisle but with a whole new nave and chancel, which effectively dragged the church’s centre of gravity a few feet to the north. This involved the relegation of the old medieval nave to the status of south aisle; and given that the old nave had already possessed its own south aisle, the overall result was to create two south aisles, inner and outer, which is what we see today. The nicely preserved arcade between them bears witness to their former more elevated status.
By the same token, a new chancel at the east end of the new nave replaced the medieval chancel, which now found itself at the east end of the inner south aisle. It was redesignated as a Lady Chapel, and in that role today it is rather intimate and lovely.
But what of the tower, which is the church’s oldest part? To the casual eye today, viewed from outside, it doesn’t look particularly old.
But its claim to a Saxon origin lies within, where there is an old window, not accessible to the public, which seems to date from the eleventh century. The base of this window may be even older. This means that the modern-looking tower which we see today is the latest iteration of a tower which has been standing here since Anglo-Saxon times. And if this is the case, then it may also mean that the relation between tower and church has changed dramatically since it was first built.
Across England as a whole, about a hundred Anglo-Saxon church towers survive, in whole or part. They vary in size and design, but there is one feature that the great majority share: they stand to the west of the nave. In Carshalton, however, the tower stands at the east end of the nave. Why the anomaly?
We have to remember that the tower was originally built to accompany a Saxon church which no longer exists; it was replaced in the twelfth century by a new Norman church. When one church directly replaces another, we tend to assume that the new church occupies the same ground, that it is in effect built on the foundations of its predecessor. Very often this assumption is justified, but not always. And in this particular case, whether or not we make this assumption, we are faced with a problem. If the Norman church was built on the same ground as the Saxon church, that must mean that the Saxon masons built their tower to the east of the nave, breaking with all their own traditions and conventions – and why would they do that? Alternatively, if the Saxon tower originally stood at the west end of the nave, then the Norman masons in the twelfth century must have gone out of their way to change the whole layout, demolishing the Saxon church which lay to the east of the tower and building their own new church to its west – but why would they do that?
Forced to choose between with these two options, the second seems to me more likely. I can see no good reason why Anglo-Saxon builders in Carshalton would choose to scandalise their contemporaries by erecting something as outrageous as an eastern church tower.
But I can see why Norman builders, a century or more later, would have chosen a new site for their new church. They might of course have been influenced by local conditions; perhaps the land to the west of the tower was better, firmer, flatter. But I think it more likely that they were making a political and ecclesiastical point by deliberately breaking with Saxon tradition, deliberately breaking with the old convention of western towers, deliberately emphasising that both state and church now had new rulers and new rules.
If this is what happened – and it is no more than an informed speculation – then it would mean that traces of the original Anglo-Saxon church may lie today not under the existing church, but to the east, between the tower and the junction where the modern High Street meets The Square.
SOURCES
Cherry, Bridget & Pevsner, Nikolaus (1994), The Buildings of England: London 2: South, London, pp. 645-6.
Malden, H.E. (ed.) (1912), A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 4, London, pp. 178-188.
Milbourn, Thomas (1880), ‘Notes on the Parish and Church of Carshalton’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 7, p. 125
Skelton, Andrew C. (1996), ‘New light on the development of Carshalton Church’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 83, pp. 1-19.
Taylor, H.M. (1978), Anglo-Saxon Architecture (vol. III), Cambridge, chapter 9.
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