Church Of St John The Baptist

The Church of St John the Baptist, in Busbridge, Godalming, was built between 1865 and 1870. It was designed by Gilbert Scott, with James Moors acting as the builder, and commissioned by John and Emma Ramsden. The church is constructed of coursed squared Bargate stone with ashlar dressings, and features a plain tile roof and a shingle spire. Its alignment is north-west to south-east, with the liturgical east being used for descriptive purposes.

The church is in the Early English Gothic style, comprising a four-bay nave, a south porch, a ‘crossing’ tower, and a lower three-bay chancel with a north organ chamber and vestry. Features include a chamfered plinth, offset buttresses, a sill string, raised verges with coping, and cross finials. Windows have quoined surrounds and hoodmoulds with decorative stops. The porch at the west end is timber-framed on a stone plinth, with a painted archway featuring carved and initialled spandrels, daubed decoration with Greek crosses in roundels, decorative bargeboards, and internal stone benches. The nave's west end incorporates paired, two-light plate-traceried windows and a cinquefoiled oculus to the gable. The eastern bay, above the ‘crossing’, has paired, cusped windows with an oculus above, surmounted by a broached wood-shingled spire featuring a louvred, cusped belfry and an iron finial. The chancel has lancet windows, while the east window is plate-traceried with three lights and a gable slit. The north vestry includes a shouldered-arched door and window, and a projecting gabled bay with a doorway leading down steps and lancets.

The interior features elaborate floral stops on the hoodmoulds of the chancel windows, with corbelled archivolts. A moulded chancel arch is supported by colonettes on floral corbels, and a wrought-iron screen, designed in 1899 by Lutyens and made by J Starkie Gardener, spans the arch. The screen depicts Christ on a flowering cross, with apostles’ symbols and praying angels. The nave incorporates an impressive timber roof structure with differing trusses and cusped wind-braces, supported by large timber posts with decoratively-stopped chamfers. The chancel roof has floral corbels supporting arch-braces rising to tie-beams, a brattished and coved base. Other interior features include a polished stone altar rail, a reredos with three central cusped panels, a brass plaque detailing building information, and original octagonal panelled stone pulpit with a traceried top. There is also a square stone font with a traceried basin supported by colonnettes on a moulded base. The west and chancel windows were designed by Burne Jones and made by Morris & Co, depicting Christ and Saints; the nave windows are by A R Nicholson.