Church Of St Botolph

Church of St Botolph, built 1835–7 by William Mason of Ipswich, is a robust neo-Norman Anglican church constructed to meet acute demand for places of worship in Colchester during the 1830s. The building accommodates 1,080 people and was dedicated in 1837.

The church is built of white brick with slate roofs. Its design draws inspiration from the ruins of the Augustinian priory immediately to the north. The plan consists of a nave of six bays, a shallow east projection for the communion table, a west tower embraced by the west parts of the nave, and a south vestry with south-east hall and other extensions.

The massive west tower frames the end of St Botolph's Street and has four stages. Its west face features a large gabled west portal between a pair of turrets with pyramidal cappings. The doorway has three orders with rolls in the arch-head and engaged shafts in the jambs; the two-leaf doors are ornamented with Norman decoration and the gable head is filled with scaly decoration. The second stage displays blind intersecting arches; the third has three tall equal-height windows; the top stage contains three further arches, the outer ones with zig-zag decoration and the central one open with wooden louvres. The tower has clasping buttresses with tall, narrow recesses on each face and in each stage. The buttresses turn octagonal in the top stage and enlarge into sturdy corner turrets with pointed cappings, with plain parapets between them.

The nave consists of six bays divided by flat pilasters rising to a Lombard decorative band, above which come plain, tall parapets. The five easterly bays contain three round-arch windows in their lower half, the central one slightly broader and higher than the flanking pair. The wall surface between these windows and the frieze is punctuated by an oculus with moulded frame; either side are tall, narrow blind recesses similar to those on the tower buttresses. The west bays of the nave serve as entrances with wooden two-leaf doors ornamented with Norman decoration. Each doorway has one order of roll-moulded brick and one order of engaged shafts. Above the entrances is a band of intersecting arches and then oculus-with-flanking-recesses. At the east end, a shallow projection houses the communion table with three windows in its east face, the central one larger than those on either side. The Lombard frieze continues up the gables of the nave and communion table projection and up the west ends of the aisles. Modern single-storey south-east extensions built in 1996–2001 by Tim Venn, partly replacing 1930s work, reinterpret devices from the original 1830s building to achieve visual linkage.

The interior retains the original 1830s ceilings and galleries, which convey a sense of the original character despite removal of nearly all 19th-century furnishings in the 1970s. The nave is covered by a semi-circular ceiling with flat ribs demarcating the bays; the ceilings over the galleries are groined. Galleries are supported by large iron columns with crudely detailed capitals; columns are repeated in an upper tier to support the roofs. Large round arches occur at the west end to the base of the tower and to the eastern projection. The chancel area has a Victorian encaustic tiled floor.

The three-sided gallery, removed from the east bays of the nave when the chancel was extended into this area in the 19th century, has gallery fronts with intersecting Norman arches mirroring similar work in brick on the exterior. A Victorian font has a hemispherical bowl set on a quatrefoil base. The east bay of the body of the chancel has delicate iron screens on both sides. The organ on the north side of the chancel is by J W Walker, dating to 1890. At the south-east corner stands an elegant monument to William Hawkins (died 1843) with a fine neo-classical near life-sized figure of Hope above, signed by J. Edwards of London, 1854. The east windows contain good work by Belgian maker J B Capronnier, 1882–3. The window in the south aisle commemorating Archbishop Harsnett is by Powell and Sons, c.1928.

William Mason (1810–97), son of architect and builder George Mason of Ipswich, was a pupil of Edward Blore and practised briefly in Ipswich before emigrating to New South Wales in 1838 and subsequently to New Zealand, where he became the colony's pioneer architect. The choice of Norman style may have been prompted by proximity to the priory ruins but reflects the widespread popularity of this style from about 1835 to 1845, before Gothic became the style of choice for Anglican churches.

The church was radically reordered in the 1970s when seating, the iron chancel screen, and a rare cast-iron pulpit were removed. In 1990 the tower was divided from the nave by a partition to create a welcome area and hospitality facilities. The church today is noted for its strong musical tradition and is extensively used for music groups and concerts.