Church Of St Clement

The Church of St Clement is a church built in 1867 by J P St Aubyn, featuring early 20th-century vestries and a side chapel. It is constructed of stock brick with red brick patterning, some stone tracery, and dressings. The roof is slated and includes a bell-cast cupola with a clock, tiny timber ventilating dormers, and drops low at the ritual east end to single-storey vestries, balanced by a similarly low porch at the north-west. The church has an unusual plan with a three-bay nave that opens to double transepts, which then narrows to an elevated three-bay chancel, surrounded by a chapel to the south-east and vestries.

The exterior features a regular arrangement of two lancets per bay under a plate traceried roundel, with each bay of the nave and transept topped by its own gable. The east window has three lancets, and the vestries have four-centred cusped lights. There is a notched brick cornice and mouldings.

Inside, the church is dominated by a vast wooden roof supported by scissor braces. The nave roof is spanned by arched tie beams and large rafters, carried on slender iron columns. At the west end, there is an octagonal font on a stone plinth set on decorative tile paving. The notched brick chancel arch and arcades (with two bays blind) lead to the chancel, which is entered between low brick walls fenced with filigree metal railings that bow out at the north-east corner to form a pulpit, a rare feature. The chancel's scissorbrace roof is supported by stout, straight wind braces. There is a painted wooden reredos, a 19th-century altar brought forward and placed on a low wooden plinth, and decorative paving. The south-east chapel, accessed through metal screens, has an English altar with a repousse copper front and a painted wooden ceiling.

The Church of St Clement is noted as a very skillful, if unusual, example of an Anglo-Catholic church from the 1860s. The slender iron columns and over-scaled timber roofs are more commonly found in evangelical churches, but here, the elements are well distributed, and the exterior is remarkably picturesque.