Church Of St John The Evangelist

Church of St John the Evangelist, New Hinksey

Built between 1898 and 1900 by the partnership of Bucknall and Comper, this church was designed to serve the southern expansion of Oxford. The building remains incomplete, with the eastern parts never constructed due to lack of funds, and the east end of the nave now serves as the chancel.

The church is built of red brick with limestone dressings and a clay tile roof over the main body, with probably leaded roofs to the aisles. It is designed in a free Perpendicular style drawing upon the architecture of late medieval East Anglian churches.

The exterior comprises a nave with north and south aisles. The nave has a gabled roof while the aisles have flat roofs behind plain brick parapets. The north side was intended as the show facade, featuring four bays to the aisle with large five-light windows that fuse both Decorated and Perpendicular forms, popular for churches around 1900. The south aisle windows are simpler, conventional four-light mullioned and cusped designs in the Perpendicular style. Each aisle bay is divided from its neighbour by large buttresses with offsets. The west window, set high above a continuously moulded doorway, has mainly Decorated elements in its tracery. Between the nave and south aisle stands a small octagonal bell-turret of limestone with a single bell; its sides are open and it has an embattled parapet with an octagonal spirelet. There is no clerestory, and the east end terminates in a blind wall.

The interior's dominant feature is the five-bay arcading on both sides with tall, wide arches rising to near the level of the wall-plate. The piers are octagonal with moulded capitals and double-chamfered arches. The roof over the nave and chancel is six-sided, divided into square panels by moulded ribs. The south aisle roof is a lean-to while that over the north aisle is almost flat. The roofs are richly decorated in cream, red, blue and gold, this decoration having been carried out in 1937 under Comper.

The altar is a commercial copy of an English altar favoured by Comper, obtained from the Warham Guild. The pulpit, to Comper's design, came from St Mary, Iffley and has traceried Gothic sides and stands on a tapering base. The aisle windows contain much bottle-end glass. The nave and chancel areas have simply appointed seating.

The adjacent brick-built vicarage is in part by H. Wilkinson Moore, dating from 1887–8, thus predating the present church.

The church originally followed a different design, shown in a drawing by Benjamin Bucknall, which envisaged gables on the aisles and a tall crocketed spirelet on the northwest corner of the north aisle, with buttresses intended to terminate in pinnacles rising above the parapets. The design was scaled back to economise, but despite its fragmentary nature the church remains a fine, spacious building of good proportions. Its tall arches, large windows and late medieval character anticipate Comper's important church of 1902–3, St Cyprian's, Clarence Gate in Marylebone, London.

J. Ninian Comper (1864–1960) was born in Aberdeen, eldest son of the Reverend John Comper, a minister in the Scottish Episcopalian Church. He was articled to Bodley and Garner and commenced practice in 1888. From that year until 1908 he was in partnership with William Bucknall (1851–1944). With the exception of the Welsh War Memorial in Cardiff (1928), all Comper's work was ecclesiastical. His first independent building was a chapel added to his father's church of St Margaret of Scotland, Aberdeen in 1889. He was staunchly Anglo-Catholic and usually worked for like-minded clients, placing great emphasis on creating beautiful settings for worship through vestments, altar furnishings, church fittings and decorative schemes. As his career progressed he became very eclectic, drawing on both medieval and post-medieval sources and creating what he described as 'beauty by inclusion'. He was knighted in 1950.