Royal Garrison Church Of All Saints

The Royal Garrison Church of All Saints is a garrison church of 1863, designed by Philip Hardwick with drawings signed by C Russell. Built in Decorated Gothic Revival style, it is constructed of English bond brick with stone dressings and a slate roof. The plan incorporates an aisled nave with north and south porches at the west end, a south transept and opposing chapel, a north tower, a northeast chapel, and a chancel.

The exterior features weathered angle buttresses to coped gables with moulded kneelers and cross finials, a plinth with weathered moulding, moulded cill bands, a brick dentil eaves cornice, and Geometrical Gothic tracery. The east gable has a two-centred arched five-light window with a central round window within the arch. A low gabled vestry projects to the left, with paired trefoil-headed lights in the end, and to the right, a low chapel with small transepts, a hexagonal apsidal end with a hipped roof, and paired trefoil-headed windows. The north side of the aisle has three bays divided by buttresses with paired lancets, gabled dormers to the nave with triple trefoil-headed lights, and a gabled porch at the west end, featuring a moulded two-centred arched doorway and triple trefoil-headed lights to the sides. The two-stage tower has clasping buttresses, a second stage with paired two-light louvred belfry openings with colonette mullions, and a pyramidal roof with bands of green and blue slates, leaded lucarnes with finials to each side, and a finial. The west gable, with lower aisle gables on either side, has a central two-centred arched five-light window, similar to that at the east end. The south side mirrors the north, but with a gabled transept instead of the tower featuring a three-light window. The aisle projects through the transept into a gable with a round light containing five cinquefoils, and a porch with a raking roof and a small two-centred arched doorway is positioned in the angle between the gables. Located in the south porch is the 1st Division British Expeditionary Force cross, a battlefield cross made of timber salvaged from Bazentin village in High Wood, Somme, erected in 1917 to commemorate casualties of September 1916 and moved to the Garrison church in 1939.

The interior is aisled, featuring a five-bay nave with round piers and octagonal capitals to moulded two-centred arches, an arch-braced roof on mock-hammer beam supports cusped above moulded corbels, and a chancel arch on half-round responds to the chancel. A square font stands on eight coloured marble shafts inscribed with the signs of the four evangelists. The church served as the original garrison church for the permanent Aldershot barracks and is notable for the involvement of a national architect, representing an early and large-scale example of a garrison church reflecting the importance of the establishment of the Aldershot camp.