Church of St Lawrence

The Church of St. Lawrence is a church dating from 1816, designed by John Pinch of Bath. It is constructed of Bath stone ashlar with lead roofs. The church is in the Gothic style and comprises a four-bay aisled nave with a clerestory, a west tower, and an apsidal chancel. The exterior features octagonal buttresses with lumpy finials, crenellated parapets, a heavy coved cornice that continues as a band across the East end and forms an impost to the East window, and an extraordinary five-light East window following the curve of the apse. The three-stage west tower is crenellated, with corner pinnacles, a Gothic lancet cornice with intersecting tracery to the windows and belfry on each stage. A Tudor arched West door has Y tracery overlight within a tall lancet surround. A projecting crenellated South porch has finials and octagonal piers. Inside, the four bays are separated by quatrefoil plan columns with leaf caps and depressed Tudor arches with ogee labels. The ceiling is panelled with arch braced ties on wall shafts springing from angel corbels. A gallery extends across the entire West End, and contains the original organ. A front of octagonal perpendicular style was added around 1826, followed by a large octagonal pulpit with alabaster panelling in 1891. Monuments include a legless, defaced knight dating from around 1350 in the North chapel, with a tablet inscribed in Lombardic script at its feet; a Baroque hanging monument from around 1673 with a swan neck pediment on the North Wall; six black and white marble wall memorials dating from the late 18th and early 19th centuries (with the Stonehouse memorial by C. Harris of London near the North East respond); a Palladian monument to Martha Hungaford, who died in 1739, on the South Wall, with two black tablets and a segmental pediment; a Gothic memorial to the Whitelock family from around 1816; a small Baroque monument to Helina Morgan, who died in 1776, with grieving putti and an armorial cartouche over a shaped tablet on the North Wall; and two brass plates dating from 1613 and 1618 set into the floor in the East end of the South aisle, bearing verse epitaphs. The East window is stained glass by Lavers and Westlake dating from around 1887.