Church Of St John The Baptist

Church of St John the Baptist

Large parish church of two distinct dates. The first part was built in 1843 by Gordon Alexander in blue brick and Romanesque style. A substantial addition of 1890–94 by Julius Chatwin in red sandstone and free-style Gothic caused demolition of much of the earlier building, though the steeple and several internal elements were retained. The later work incorporates elements of French Flamboyant style alongside English Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic. The building is constructed of very fine red sandstone in finely jointed ashlar with stone tracery and a tiled roof. The unusual blue-brick south-west tower and spire features buff stone dressings.

The plan is complex: nave and chancel, south nave and lady chapel, south aisle transept and porch, north aisle and organ transept incorporating vestries. Windows throughout feature mostly Geometric tracery of varying designs. The south elevation displays a crenellated parapet to the clerestory, with clerestory windows of Perpendicular proportions featuring three cusped lights and continuous hoodmould, separated by pilasters. Aisle windows are more steeply pointed in Decorated proportions, of two lights set in pairs and separated by stepped buttresses. String courses cross both storeys, with plinth and hoodmoulds to all windows. The south porch is very deep with a crenellated parapet and blind canopy-work beneath the gable, with a deeply moulded pointed-arched doorway featuring heavy cusping and metal gates.

The south-east elevation clearly shows the stepped effect of the building sequence: porch, south transept, south aisle, lady chapel apse and sanctuary apse. The lady chapel apse has lancet-shaped windows with trefoil tracery but no external mouldings, with buttresses featuring offsets at the angles. The soaring, lofty east end has long three-light windows with trefoil tracery to each face of the five-sided apse, with tall buttresses that have offsets only at upper levels and a low plinth. All design features emphasize verticality and height. The north elevation differs from the south: there is no parapet to aisle or clerestory, so the steep pitch of the roofs is more visible. Clerestory windows form a long range of plain lancets; aisle windows match the south side. A vestry block at the north-east has a round window in the gable.

The west elevation of the nave features a stepped group of five very narrow lancets with narrow hoodmoulds at upper level and unadorned lancets below, separated by string courses, with polygonal corner turrets capped by pepperpot finials. At the south-west corner, attached to the south-west wall of the nave and west wall of the south nave, stands the tower and spire in completely different material, style and scale. The tower has four storeys with clasping buttresses featuring offsets. All openings are round-arched in Romanesque style with slender stone colonettes and round-arched stone mouldings. The belfry has double louvred lights, with a narrow clock storey below, tower chamber below that, and a ground-floor west entrance doorway—the original entrance to the church. Behind the corbelled tower parapet with small corner turrets sits the narrow octagonal spire with tall lucarnes to the principal faces.

The interior is striking in its height and the quality of workmanship throughout. Most of the nave is faced with yellow and red polychrome brickwork. The sanctuary has bare sandstone ashlar in buff with red banding, while the lady chapel has plain red sandstone ashlar. Moulded steeply pointed-arched arcades flank north and south. The main nave has piers quatrefoil in plan with ring-moulded capitals and slender clustered shafts rising from corbels in the spandrels to the vault. Fine timber roofs crown both naves, featuring decoratively carved arch-braces (crenellated in the south nave and rising from deep stone corbels), wind-braces in two tiers to the centre and a single tier to the south nave, and boarded ceilings. The chancel has a fine high ribbed and boarded vault. An extremely high chancel arch with multiple mouldings dies into deep tiered decoratively carved stone corbels incorporating face-stops at the level of the nave capitals.

A stone pulpit with Romanesque arches and vaulted crocketed canopy is positioned within the end pier of the south-east nave under the capital, adjacent to the south entrance. Near the south entrance stands a square stone font with free-standing corner columns and a central stem. Nave floors are fine quality narrow glazed tiles. The sanctuary features a complete pattern of yellow, red and black encaustic tiles on two levels. The lady chapel at the east end of the south nave has encaustic tiles at three levels and is dominated by a fine stone, marble and alabaster Romanesque-style arcade around the apse. The arches feature deep and heavy zig-zag and billet moulding, with polished black marble shafts and finely wrought pierced patterned alabaster to the recesses. The taller and wider central arch incorporates a relief sculpture of the Last Supper. These Romanesque fittings appear to have been incorporated from the earlier 1843 building. The chapel and adjacent east end of the south aisle are divided from the south transept by a fine wooden screen of 1931 in late medieval style, featuring linenfold panelling to the wainscot, muntins, delicate tracery, frieze and cresting. An Incorporated Church Building Society panel dated 1842 records seating for 1,255, of which 858 seats were free, from the first church.

Good figurative stained glass is evident, particularly in three chancel windows (two dated 1914), the lady chapel, the east end of the south aisle, and the west end of the nave at lower level (dated 1928). Decorative glass fills the clerestory. Chancel stalls of 1907 are of good quality woodwork, with an aumbry on the north side of the sanctuary, a fine eagle lectern, and unusual canopied churchwarden's seats in the rear nave. The organ, originally in the north chancel, now stands on a west gallery in a case erected to commemorate fifty years as organist of William Wadely from 1877 to 1927.

Blockings of the south and north aisles and west end dating to the 1970s have detracted from the interior appearance, and some polychrome brickwork inside the partitions has been painted. There has been no serious loss of historic fabric.

The church stands within a large, long walled rectangular churchyard with blue brick walling of the 1840s and a round-arched entrance gateway from the main road, Bewdley Road. The church is an important building in the local townscape. It represents a very fine late-Victorian church with furnishings and workmanship of very high quality, incorporating parts from an earlier 1843 church, reflecting the wealth of the town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although its reordering in the 1970s was unsympathetic to the building, it does not diminish overall quality, which includes fine materials and craftsmanship, dramatic interior spaces and fittings, and a bold French Gothic exterior that is an important local landmark.