Church of St Michael and All Angels

Church of St Michael and All Angels

Built in 1906–1907, this church on Milton Road in South Beddington was designed by the prominent architect William Douglas Caröe. It replaced an earlier temporary timber church from 1871 known as Bandon Hill church, which had served as a daughter church of St Mary, Beddington. Tenders were received in May 1906, and the contract was awarded to E J Burnand and Co for £6,293. The foundation stone was laid on 16 June by Harry Lloyd in the presence of the Bishop of Kingston, and the building opened in 1907. The west end was completed in 1928, though an intended tower over the crossing was never built.

The church is constructed of English bond bright red brick with minimal freestone dressings and clay tile roofs, with mostly timber windows throughout.

The plan comprises a nave, west narthex, north and south passage aisles, porches at the south east and north west of the nave, chancel, a chapel to the south east of the south aisle, and to the north a vestry and organ chamber.

The west end, which faces the road, features a large five-light Perpendicular window under a depressed head. A flat-roofed single-storey narthex runs across the west front with entrances to north and south, covered by flat triangular concrete canopies. The narthex has three one-light windows in its central portion, which projects forward from flanking sections each containing a two-light Perpendicular window. The narthex window heads are formed of tiles laid on edge. The nave and aisles are covered by a broad continuous roof without a clerestory. The aisle walls have broad bays with windows recessed under arches, with a sloping tiled section at the foot of each window restoring the wall plane. Unusually, the window frames, mullions and cusping are of wood, as are most other windows throughout the church except those at the west and east ends. Brick and tiled gables break through the aisle roofs, expressing the arches over the passage aisles inside. The south chapel has two bays of plain four-light windows. The eastern parts present complex massing: a low tower sits over the choir, ornamented at its top with small triangular details. To its east is the sanctuary with tall two-light wooden windows to north and south, and a large high-set east window with a central brick buttress and four lights either side. To the north are the large organ chamber and the separately gabled vestry; to the south is the three-sided east end of the chapel.

The interior is plastered and whitened throughout except for red brick detailing. The nave has four-bay arcades with lozenge-shaped piers into which the arches die, their outer order of bare brick matching those elsewhere in the church. The aisles are narrow passages covered by east-west plastered arches. The chancel is considerably narrower than the nave, with low arches either side of the chancel arch leading to passages running either side of the choir. The south chapel opens from the southern passage aisle through a pair of arches as wide as the nave arcades but lower and with depressed heads. The arch-braced nave roof is carried on bulky corbels sitting on triangular wall-shafts. Wood-block floors run through the nave and aisles, while the choir and sanctuary have grey and red tiles laid in a zig-zag pattern. The pews have been removed from the nave.

On the south side of the chancel is a combined double sedilia and piscina under a very shallow arched head. The choir-stalls are the most notable furnishings, with beautifully detailed ends and frontals. The nave is now seated with modern chairs. The font is a conventional octagonal design with plain detailing. A semi-circular platform has been extended west of the choir to accommodate a nave altar by Covell Matthews, installed in the 1970s.

William Douglas Caröe (1857–1938) was a leading church architect of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was articled to Edmund Kirby of Liverpool in 1879–1880, then transferred his articles in 1881 to the great Gothic revivalist J.L. Pearson, which he held until 1883. He travelled extensively on the continent between 1877 and 1882 before establishing his practice in London in 1883, after which he developed a prolific church-building and restoration practice. He became architect to the deans and chapters of Southwell, Hereford, Brecon and Exeter, and was architect to the Charity Commission and to the Ecclesiastical Commission from 1895. He is noted for his freely-treated and imaginative handling of the Gothic style, with his grandest and finest church being St David's in Exeter.

St Michael's exemplifies Caröe's approach to Gothic architecture. Although rooted in medieval architecture, of which he had considerable knowledge, it is handled with originality. The massing, the treatment of the aisle-side windows, the use of red brick heads to the internal arches, and the extraordinary use of wooden windows are all distinctly early 20th-century rather than medieval in character. The church has been described as outstanding among Caröe's suburban churches, with its interior refinement astonishing in its unexpectedness and skilful execution.