Church of All Saints

Church of All Saints

This church was designed by George Halford Fellowes Prynne and built between 1901 and 1903 by the builder Goddard and Sons. The foundation stone was laid on 2 November 1901 and the church was consecrated in 1903.

The building is constructed of red brick with stone dressings, with yellow stock brick to the entrance area. The roof is clay tiled, with slate hanging on the west wall and a slate roof to the lean-to entrance.

The church comprises a nave with projecting entrance area, chancel, aisles, and north vestries with organ chamber. The church was never completed at the west end, and the temporary west frontage now faces the road. This elevation features slate hanging on the nave gable and a lean-to entrance area with a central doorway flanked by two lancet windows. The west walls of the aisles are blind and have keying to receive further brick structures that were never built. The nave is of three bays and the aisles have transverse gables to each bay. The east end is tall but not open to view. The fenestration in the east wall is arranged in a 1-3-1-light configuration with Decorated tracery in the heads. The aisle windows are tall with two lights and tracery of around 1300. There is no nave clerestory, but the sanctuary has high-set single light windows to the sides.

The interior presents a striking contrast to the unfinished west elevation and forms a fine example of a fin-de-siècle Anglo-Catholic church, confidently composed around the raised altar at the east end. The interior features restrained structural polychromy, primarily in red brick enlivened by limestone dressings and yellow brick. The nave arcades have red and yellow brick polychromy with sturdy octagonal red-brick piers banded with limestone. The mouldings of the arches die into the piers, a popular late Gothic Revival feature. Wall-shafts rise from corbels at the springing level of the arches. The sanctuary contains large expanses of bare red brick with three rectangular rendered panels on each side below the level of the side windows, apparently intended for a decorative scheme. The sanctuary is reached by a series of steps up to the high altar and is laid with black and white marble. On the north side of the chancel, two depressed polychrome arches lead to a passage above which is the organ chamber. The chancel roof is keeled in wood, while the nave roof is semi-circular. The nave has wood-block floors. At the west end of the nave, a small chapel and parish room were created behind a neo-Gothic screen in the 1990s, with a corridor running between them to the west entrance.

The principal architectural feature is a majestic stone screen in the chancel arch, one of the architect's hallmark designs derived from medieval examples at Great Bardfield and Stebbing in Essex. It stands on a low solid screen with quatrefoil details. Two moulded piers rise vertically as mullions to the head of the arch, with a transom at the springing below which runs cusped tracery work. Above is more elaborate tracery containing three lights with rood figures. Fine iron screens and gates sit at the base. To the south of the chancel arch is a First World War memorial wall tablet in marble and alabaster. A foundation stone is built into the east end of the north aisle. The pulpit is a conventional piece with open traceried sides standing on stone columns. The nave is furnished with chairs. At the west end of the north aisle stands an octagonal font with ornate foliage capitals and marble shafts to the base, a somewhat anachronistic high Victorian piece rather than one of around 1900; the bowl is decorated with quatrefoils. A modern stone altar stands forward from the chancel arch on three stone steps. The vestries each contain an attractive brown tiled fire surround.

George Halford Fellowes Prynne (1853-1927) left England for Canada in 1871, where he became a pupil of Richard Windeyer of Toronto from 1872 to 1875. He returned to England and worked as an improver in the office of G E Street before establishing independent practice in 1879. His output was primarily as a church architect. He was well regarded and became diocesan architect for Oxford from 1913. A particular hallmark of his practice was the use of stone screens in chancel arches. His first such screen was at All Saints, Rosendale Road, Brixton (1891, destroyed by fire), and his finest example is at St Peter, Staines (1894).