Church Of St James

The Church of St James is a long and low building that resulted from four major building episodes spanning over 150 years. The earliest and principal part is the chancel, designed in Perpendicular style by James Green, a Coventry stonemason, and erected in 1817. It features an embattled roof, a five-sided east-facing apse, and ashlar walls. The nave and baptistry were added in 1955, the vestry in 1959, and the tower in 1965. The church walls are ashlar except for the brick-built vestry. The roofs are slate except for the baptistry, which has a lead roof.

The chancel is buttressed and lit by Tudor-style arched windows with intersecting tracery. The five-sided apse adjoins the chancel to the east. The nave has a roof descending to three large north and south gables filled with triangular-headed windows incorporating free Perpendicular-style tracery. In the western bay on the southern side stands a polygonal baptistry with cinquefoil-headed one-light windows. The tower, added to the western side of the nave in 1965, is designed in Arts and Crafts style. It includes a porch at ground level with trefoil-headed one-light windows with triangular-headed hoodmoulds, a moulded western doorway, diagonal buttresses, a parapet above a stringcourse, and a low-pitched slate roof. The brick-built vestry, attached to the southern side of the chancel and part of the apse, has seven chamfered triangular-headed one-light windows and a triangular-headed eastern doorway with a pitch roof.

Interior

The walls are plaster-covered and the ceilings largely wooden. A moulded chamfered arch leads into the chancel, which has a depressed Tudor-arched roof divided into panels by moulded ribs with carved bosses at the intersections. The chancel is lit through the apse and by a pair of Tudor-style two-light windows in each of the long walls; those on the north are full-size, whilst those on the south have been truncated by the later vestry. Between each pair of windows hangs a hatchment, and on the southern wall is a First World War memorial plaque. A moulded Tudor arch leads into the apse from the chancel and is filled with a glazed wooden-framed partition. The apse has a plastered Gothic vault with slender plaster piers on the eastern wall and contains a number of wall monuments to members of the Gregory family.

The nave roof dominates the interior, with principal rafters curving right down to the floor in a cruck-like fashion. The roof itself has two sets of purlins and is boarded behind. The floor is woodblock. The pulpit, reading desk, and a fragment of chancel screen, possibly of 1817 date, form part of a suite of furnishings, all panelled with blind trefoil-headed arches. The baptistry contains circa 1955 stained-glass windows in a conservative style. The octagonal font with a deep octagonal bowl on an octagonal stem is difficult to date, though Pevsner suggests it may belong to the 1660s.

History

A medieval church stood on this site but was demolished in the early nineteenth century. In 1817 it was replaced by a small church with apse, designed by James Green for A R Gregory, Esq., of the adjacent Stivichall Hall. In 1955 the church was considerably extended with the addition of the nave and baptistry under the patronage of Alexander HM Gregory-Hood. The vestry was dedicated in 1959, and the tower was added in 1965.