Church of St Mary

Church of St Mary

Built 1865-6, designed by the renowned architect George Edmund Street for Blanche Wroughton of Woolley Park. The builders were Rogers and Booth of Gosport, Hampshire. The church is designed in 13th-century Anglo-French Gothic style.

The exterior is constructed of squared coursed Bisley Common rubble stone from Gloucestershire, with dressed stone surrounds to the windows and buttress quoins. Bath stone elements are incorporated throughout, and the roofs are tiled. The building displays uniform decorative features including moulded strings below cill levels, offset buttresses, and gable parapets crowned with cross finials.

The church is entered through a gabled south porch set hard against the west end. This porch has a steeply pitched roof and a moulded two-centred arched entrance supported by a plain timber structure. The door is boarded with large wrought-iron hinges decorated with branching leaves. The main body comprises a square nave with aisles lit by paired trefoil-headed windows beneath low eaves. Each aisle has a plate-traceried window with a quatrefoil above lancets at its west end. The large west window features geometric intersecting tracery. The chancel lies at the east end, with a vestry to the north and an organ chamber to the south at the foot of the tower. Beyond the chancel is an apsidal sanctuary.

The tower, positioned in the angle of the south aisle and chancel, rises in four stages marked by angle buttresses at the corners and topped with a pyramidal roof. The lower stages have pointed plate-traceried windows, the third stage has lancets, and the uppermost stage displays paired pointed louvres to each side with quatrefoil panels between the heads. The tall apse forms the most overtly French element of the exterior design, with a cill band dividing its height. The walls beneath are blind, while uncusped bar-traceried windows occupy the upper portion. Buttresses with very shallow offsets divide the windows, emphasising vertical lines. On the north side above the organ chamber is a small plate-traceried roundel, while the chamber itself is lit by lancets.

The interior immediately draws attention to the raised, light, vaulted chancel, its dramatic effect heightened by the relatively dim light of the wide aisled nave with its low arcades. Light emerges from the narrow aisle windows set deep in pointed segmental-arched embrasures. The tooled stone walls are left unplastered, and the timber roofs are constructed of canted common rafters. The three-bay aisles are supported on sturdy circular piers of dark polished Devonshire marble with Bath stone capitals carved with varied stylised leaf patterns. These piers support chamfered pointed arches. The chancel arch rests on paired marble shafts and is surrounded by chevron moulding. A low stone screen with quatrefoil pierced panels between marble colonnettes, capped with marble, divides the chancel from the nave.

Integral to the screen is a rounded stone pulpit to the north, entered from the chancel. This pulpit features a marble balustrade and chevron moulding to its base, resting on dwarf piers. In the chancel and sanctuary, a rib-vaulted stone roof springs from marble shafts that also frame the rere-arches of the windows. In the sanctuary to the south, paired sedilia under pointed arches are separated by a marble shaft, with the piscine to the west beneath a triangular arched moulding. Wrought-iron screens separate the chancel from the vestry and organ chamber, while an oak screen with trefoil-headed panelled doors and wrought-iron hinges separates the north aisle from the vestry. Stone steps with chamfered ends lead up the south wall of the organ chamber to the bell tower.

Street's original fittings remain largely untouched. The tripartite reredos was created by Thomas Earp and consists of inlaid carved stone with a central Crucifixion backed by golden mosaic by Salviati. The original pews remain, with moulded ends and smaller versions provided for children. The choir stalls feature metal candle holders and fronts pierced with plate tracery and fleur-de-lys. An oak double lectern stands on a complex moulded stand. The font echoes the design of the pulpit, with a circular basin decorated with trefoil-arched panelling resting on clustered dwarf columns, topped by an oak cover enriched with a foliate metalwork cross.

The east window contains stained glass by Morris and Company installed in 1868 and paid for by subscription in memory of Philip Wroughton. The upper roundel contains a Pre-Raphaelite nativity scene. A stone tablet commemorates a later Philip Wroughton of Woolley Park, killed during the First World War, and also his younger brother who died in childhood. The floor is laid with red, black and yellow tiles, including geometric and encaustic tiles by Godwin in the chancel and sanctuary.