Church Of The Most Holy Trinity With St Mary

Church of the Most Holy Trinity with St Mary

This church, built in 1847–8, was designed by William Railton, the architect of Nelson's Column. It stands on the west side of Bletchley Street in Hoxton and was constructed to serve the expanding population of the area during the early Victorian period.

The building is constructed of small coursed blocks of Kentish ragstone with limestone dressings and has slate roofs. A brick southeast vestry was added in the twentieth century.

The church is designed in the Early English style of the thirteenth century, executed with archaeological accuracy that was unusual for the period. The plan comprises a nave, lower chancel, southwest tower with baptistry, north and south aisles, and northeast and southeast vestries.

The east end fronts directly onto Bletchley Street and features three graded lancets forming an east window, now blocked. The short chancel has a single lancet on either side. The nave and lean-to aisles comprise four bays, demarcated by buttresses with offsets, and are lit by pairs of lancets in each bay. The principal west elevation, which blocks the view along Alford Place, features a tall nave with three graded lancets for a west window, the sloping ends of the aisles each with a single lancet window, and the southwest steeple. The tower has two stages with a pair of tall lancets in the lower part and a belfry stage with a small narrow single lancet to each face flanked by narrow blind arches. The broach spire has ribs at the angles and an ornamented band halfway up. The west entrance has a moulded arched head with a shaft in each reveal. All exterior windows and arches feature hood-moulds.

The interior walls are plastered and whitened. The four-bay body of the church contains arcades between the nave and aisles with moulded arches, octagonal piers and moulded capitals; the bases have sharply pointed broaches to smooth the transition from square bases to octagonal piers. Between the nave and short chancel is a very richly moulded arch with dog-tooth ornament in the head and responds with multiple shafts. The proximity of the road beyond the east wall prevented eastward expansion of the chancel, so the chancel area extended into the east bay of the nave, whose floor was raised and is now flanked by low white glazed brick walls. The tall nave has a roof with arch-braces to a collar with a thin crown-post, with wall-posts rising from stone corbels. The projecting one-bay chancel area has a vaulted roof painted blue in the late twentieth century with stars. The aisle roofs are simple lean-tos. The east wall has five graded lancet arches, the middle three being blocked windows.

The most significant fixture is the polygonal pulpit made in 1686 for the church of St Mary Somerset, Upper Thames Street (demolished in the 1870s except for the tower), subsequently moved to the now-demolished church of St Mary, Britannia Walk, Hoxton. It has panelled sides and appears to have been of the wine-glass type, though its stem is now lost. Part of a font cover from the same source is reused as a corbel for a statue.

The church has an extensive collection of Anglo-Catholic fittings from the 1930s onwards. The reredos with a relief of the Crucifixion is by W E A Lockett. The confessional, with tall Corinthian pilasters possibly made up from old woodwork, is by Martin Travers, who also executed the painting above the reredos (1942) and the roundel above the chancel arch. At the west end is a mid-twentieth-century organ gallery; the organ came from Holy Trinity, Folkestone. The high altar was assembled in 1941 from stones from six churches destroyed by air raids in 1940–1. The Victorian wooden altar in the north aisle has attractive floral paintings set in mandorlas. The tiled dado at the east end commemorates a death in 1874. The mid-nineteenth-century pews are movable with L-shaped ends and open backs. The mid-nineteenth-century font has an octagonal bowl with mouldings and a nail-head band, set on a stout octagonal base. The only surviving stained glass is a window of 1891 in the baptistry; the remainder was destroyed in the Second World War.

In 1896, a faculty was granted to convert the base of the tower into a baptistry, with architect Spencer W. Grant overseeing this work.

The short chancel suggests that in its early years the church did not possess the strong high churchmanship that characterised it in the twentieth century and continues to characterise its worship today.

William Railton (c.1801–77) was a pupil of the London architect William Inwood and attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1823. He served as architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from 1838 to 1848 and designed churches and many other buildings across a wide geographical range. His most famous work is Nelson's Column, built 1839–43 in Trafalgar Square.