Church Of St Martin

The Church of St Martin is a parish church dating back to 1914, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with a western bay added in 1963-4 by Sir Albert Richardson. It is built in a Tuscan style using red/brown brick with lighter red brick dressings, featuring stone bands and pantiled roofs. Wide wooden eaves are supported by plain brackets. The building follows a cruciform plan within a rectangular structure and includes a semi-circular apse.

The single-storey aisles are set back from the west front and feature moulded stone cornices and panelled west doors with moulded architraves and block stone panels. Small arched leaded windows are present throughout the nave and aisles. A three-light arched window at the west end is surmounted by a pediment gable and a four-column timber and copper belfry tower with weathervane, constructed in Richardson’s later style, which is distinctive yet harmonious with Lutyens’ original design.

The interior is remarkable and follows a classical style. The aisles are separated from the nave by small arches supported on Tuscan columns, which continue as an arcade around the transepts. Giant single Tuscan columns articulate the transepts from the nave and support a plain wooden beamed ceiling. A single large niche is located at the east end, flanked by pilasters, and arched recesses with Tuscan columns are found in the transept walls. The nave floor slopes upwards towards the chancel, contrasting with the steeply sloping auditorium floor found in Lutyens’ earlier non-conformist church at Hampstead Garden Suburb. Integral chancel stalls are raised on five steps and a moulded stone base, complementing the lecterns on elaborately moulded stone plinths, showcasing Lutyens's mastery of classical mouldings. The steps and sanctuary floor are decorated with alternating black and white square marble slabs. The altar is raised on three further steps behind a balustraded altar rail. In the north-west aisle is a stone font shaped like a large baluster, with a turned timber lid, set on a cruciform-shaped plinth.

Christopher Hussey considered the church notable for its "duplicated arched aisles," while Pevsner and Cherry recognised it as one of Lutyens’s most remarkable churches, foreshadowing the Baroque mastery of his later scheme for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.