Church Of The Holy Innocents

Church of the Holy Innocents, High Beech

A cruciform Gothic Revival church built in 1872–3 to the designs of Arthur William Blomfield, one of the most active and successful church architects of the Gothic revival period. The building replaced an earlier brick church (St Paul's) that had stood on a different site and served the remote Sewardstone area of Waltham Abbey parish.

The church is constructed of rock-faced, snecked rubble with limestone dressing and has clay tile roofs. Its design draws primarily from Early English work of the 13th century. The plan comprises a nave with a lower, semi-circular apsed chancel, north and south transepts, a north-west steeple, a south porch, and a south-east vestry.

The steeple is based on types common in the East Midlands. It features angle buttresses that rise nearly to the top of the tower and two-light belfry windows with plate tracery. The limestone spire has short broaches and two tiers of lucarnes. The west front of the nave displays a pair of tall lancet windows with, between and above them, an oculus filled with a series of cusped circles. The side windows of the nave are Geometrical, of two lights with cusped circles in their head. The chancel apse has a series of single lancet windows and a corbel course of projecting blocks below the eaves.

Internally, the walls are plastered and whitened. Around the east end of the chancel, the windows have nook shafts with stiff-leaf foliage capitals and moulded heads. The nave windows are plainly treated. The arches to the transepts spring from corbels and short shafts with depressed arch heads. The most striking internal feature is the steeply-pitched roof over the nave, in which the main trusses have short hammerbeams with arch braces to a collar across which runs a longitudinal member carrying thin collars between the common rafters. The chancel roof is boarded, and the six ribs in the apse meet at a central point.

Most of the church's fittings are original. The pews are largely complete with L-shaped ends. The font is a circular Norman Revival design with blind arches round the bowl, standing on a drum of grey granite surrounded by shafts of pink granite. The stone pulpit is polygonal with a recessed quatrefoil on each face. The sanctuary has an attractive encaustic tile pavement in brown, green, white and other colours. The organ at the west end is by 'Father' Henry Willis and dates from 1878 (a gift from T C Baring), very little altered and one of his smaller instruments. The Lady chapel contains a window signed by Mayer and Co., dating to around 1897. The three east lancets are by James Powell and Sons, 1948, replacing glass lost in a bomb blast in 1945. The tower contains thirteen hemispherical bells cast in 1873 by the Whitechapel Foundry, forming a carillon.

The impetus for the new church came from Thomas Charles Baring, a director of Barings Brothers' Bank who had recently moved to Wallsgrove House and took an interest in local affairs. He offered to pay for the church himself, and the land was given by Charles William Hamilton Sotheby, lord of the manor. The new church opened on 22 June 1873 and was consecrated on 18 August 1883. It became a parish church the following year, and the old building was demolished in 1885.

Arthur William Blomfield (1829–99) was the fourth son of Bishop Charles J Blomfield of London. He was articled to P C Hardwick and began independent practice in London in 1856. His early work is characterised by strong muscular quality and the use of structural polychrome, often with continental influences. He became diocesan architect to Winchester, securing numerous church-building commissions throughout the diocese, and was also appointed architect to the Bank of England from 1883. Blomfield was knighted in 1889 and awarded the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal in 1891.