St Botolph'S Church

St Botolph's Church

Parish church built between 1872 and 1879 by Edmund Evan Scott, with the south aisle and transept rebuilt and a choir vestry added in 1903 to 1905 by Robert Singer Hyde. Parish rooms were added in 1982.

The building is constructed of flint with red brick and Bath stone dressings, with a Welsh slate roof and tile cresting. The spire is shingled.

The church is cruciform in plan, comprising a five-bay nave with a narrow lean-to north aisle and wider south aisle, a south-west tower, north and south transepts (containing an organ chamber and Lady Chapel respectively), and a chancel with choir and clergy vestries to the north. Modern parish rooms adjoin the north aisle.

The exterior is in Early English style. The west front features two tall deeply-recessed lancets with a quatrefoil above. The north aisle, partly obscured by the 1982 extension, has small cusped lancets with triple lancets to the clerestorey above. A choir vestry projects to the north-east in front of the north transept. The three-stage tower doubles as a porch, with a pointed brick entrance archway to the south flanked by stone colonettes. Similar colonettes frame double lancet belfry openings in the brick upper stage, with a plain corbel-table above supporting a tall broach spire. The chancel has a four-light east window with plate tracery. The south aisle and transept, rebuilt in 1905, are in a later Gothic style with bar-traceried windows; the transept has a small lean-to porch to the west.

Interior walls are faced in brown brick with red brick and stone dressings. The five-bay nave arcades comprise moulded red brick on cylindrical stone columns with single attached shafts, the latter supporting slender wall shafts which support the main trusses of the open arch-braced roof. The clerestorey windows are triple lancets with free-standing colonettes. The chancel arch has brick piers and stone shafts, above which are twin Alpha and Omega roundels. The south transept and chancel have raised floors and boarded wagon roofs. In the south wall of the chancel are four blind cusped arches forming sedilia and a piscina.

Fixtures and fittings include simple pine pews with pointed-arched ends in the nave and aisles; an octagonal stone font with arcaded sides and a base formed of four granite colonettes with crocket capitals; an octagonal stone pulpit with figures of saints in niches, dated 1889; an altarpiece in the south transept of 1935 by WHR Blacking; and a simple stone war memorial panel in the south transept. Stained glass of various dates includes the west window, depicting four English saints and installed in 1892 in memory of Revd Henry McLeod Beckles, and the east window depicting the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection, with Christ in Majesty above.

The medieval church at Heene was in existence from the 11th century and was rebuilt on the present site in the 13th century. This building, a chapel-of-ease in the parish of West Tarring, became ruinous by the early 18th century and was largely demolished at some point after 1766, leaving only fragmentary remains that still stand to the east of the present church. The current church was founded in 1872 as part of a housing development by the Heene Estate Land Company that turned the former hamlet into a suburb of Worthing. Edmund Evan Scott, a Brighton architect, was chosen to design the new church, which was developed in two stages: first in 1872 to 1873, the chancel, transepts and three bays of the nave, and then in 1879 the western end of the nave and the tower. Further residential expansion led to the enlargement of the church in 1903 to 1905. Initial proposals would have seen the earlier church almost completely rebuilt, but the works actually carried out by Scott's former partner Robert Singer Hyde comprised only the reconstruction of the south aisle and transept and the addition of a choir vestry. In 1935 the south transept was converted into a Lady Chapel.

Edmund Evan Scott (1828 to 1895) was a Brighton-based architect, best known as the designer of St Bartholomew's Church in that city, a vast brick edifice commissioned by Fr Arthur Wagner that ranks as the tallest parish church in Britain. Scott was elected ARIBA in 1851 and worked in partnership with a number of other local architects, including his one-time pupil Robert Singer Hyde (circa 1845 to 1913). He was responsible for a number of other churches in Sussex, including St Mary's at Buxted (1885 to 1886) and the rebuilding of St Cosmas and St Damian at Keymer (1865 to 1866 and 1890). His secular buildings include the former Royal Sussex Regiment drill hall on Church Street, Brighton (1889 to 1890).