Church Of St Thomas

Church of St Thomas, Brampton

This is a parish church built in 1830-31 by the architects Woodhead & Hurst of Doncaster, with a chancel added in 1888 by Naylor and Sale, and restored in 1903 by Adams. The church cost £3013 to build, with a grant of £2063 from the Church Commissioners.

The church is constructed of hammer-dressed gritstone in regular courses with freestone dressings. The roof is covered with graded slate. Snecked rubble has been used for the organ chamber and north chancel wall.

The building comprises a nave, a lower and narrower chancel, a south vestry, a north organ chamber, and a west tower. The overall design follows the plain Gothic style favoured in the early 19th century.

The west tower is narrow and three storeys tall, with angle buttresses and crowned by an embattled parapet with pinnacles. The tall west doorway has a broad chamfer and is surmounted by a single-light window. The second stage features a south clock face and a roundel for a clock face on the west side. Pairs of two-light bell openings have a transom formed by a broad quatrefoil frieze. The north-west vestry and south-west porch, which flank the tower, each has a two-light window with intersecting cusped tracery. The north doorway is partly blocked and has an attached link to a modern church hall. The south door is modern, though its tympanum is made up of blind Gothic tracery in wood. The five-bay nave is buttressed with big pinnacles rising from angle buttresses and has a frieze of shields below the eaves. Three-light windows feature intersecting cusped tracery. The chancel is in Perpendicular style with a five-light east window and two high-set two-light south windows above the vestry. The vestry, dated 1963 on rainwater heads, re-uses older masonry from the nave and chancel walls.

The wide nave was designed to accommodate a three-sided gallery, though any such structure has been removed. The nine-bay roof has boxed beams and a bold stencilled scheme of Christian symbols and inscriptions added in the late 19th century. An oriel window in the west wall of the nave was built in commemoration of George V (1910-36). The porch has a painted and embossed roof in the same spirit as the nave. The chancel arch has an inner order on corbels and a three-bay collar-beam roof on corbelled brackets, with corbels painted with symbols of the Evangelists. Walls are plastered. The original nave floor is concealed beneath a raised modern floor, while the chancel has a mosaic floor and floorboards below the choir stalls.

The choir stalls have shaped ends, open-arcaded frontals and panelled backs. One tier incorporates poppy heads to the ends, and the back row has a high-panelled back and canopy. The communion rail, probably 20th century, has wooden angel balusters. The sanctuary is panelled, and the war-memorial reredos has empty niches and a wide central panel under an ogee head. The east window, dating to around 1891, shows the crucifixion. Other glass is late 19th or early 20th century, including windows depicting Saints Thomas, Cecilia and King David by Morris & Co (c1915). Font, benches and pulpit have been removed from the nave.

The south vestry was built in 1963.