Church of St Mark (Including Tower)

Church of St Mark (Including Tower)

Built between 1868 and 1870 by the Wimborne architects George Evans and Walter John Fletcher, with a new nave added by Guy Pound in 1986–7, the Church of St Mark stands as the principal building of Talbot Village, a philanthropic community established from 1850 by sisters Georgina and Mary Anne Talbot to provide housing and support for local people whose common rights had been removed by the Enclosure Act of 1822.

The church is constructed of Swanage and Stalbridge stone with dressings probably of Doulting stone, and roofed in blue slate. The design comprises an aisleless four-bay nave with transepts, a two-bay chancel, a north-east vestry, and a dominant west tower, with a porch on the south side of the tower (enlarged in 1970). A substantial new nave projects northward, forming a T-shaped plan, with church halls to the south-west connected by a glazed link.

The 19th-century fabric employs Early English style, though the proportions and plan of the west tower borrow from Perpendicular. The tower rises in four stages with angle buttresses finishing at the base of the bell stage and a semicircular north-east stair turret. Clock faces sit in moulded stone frames. The bell-openings contain two lights with trefoil in plate tracery, flanked by two plain blind lancets, with a flat parapet above. The remainder of the church displays Geometric bar tracery, the east window comprising three lights with carved dripstones.

Internally, brick walls are now plastered and painted. The chancel arch is moulded, standing on polished marble shafts with carved corbels. The arch-braced collar-beam roof features diagonal boarding and carved spandrels in the braces; the chancel roof is similar but with more elaborate carved wallplates and exceptionally fine carved corbels. The chancel floor is laid with encaustic tiles. The nave is plainer, with tiled floors, moulded corbels to principal roof timbers, and a tower arch on shafts with moulded capitals. Three Gothic arches of traditional form open northward into the new nave.

The old nave contains light oak bench pews dating from about 1986, repositioned as rear seats facing the new nave. The former chancel functions as a chapel with facing stalls of matching design. An octagonal pulpit of Caen stone with lancet openings on shafts of red Italian marble dates from about 1870. Beneath the west tower stands a white marble font of Roman origin—a classical piece found in fragments in the Tiber and presented by Sir George Talbot. The broad shallow bowl rests on a short column-like stem atop a square plinth. The east window was created by Lawrence Lee in 1979 and depicts St Mark with the church shown at bottom right. A full-height window at the north of the nave displays a yellow cross emerging from greeny-blue tones.

The church underwent substantial alterations in 1985–6 when the new nave of cast concrete blocks faced with hammer-dressed rubble was pushed northward from the original structure. This addition features steep roofs with overhanging eaves and a full-height end window. A north vestry was added after 1955, and the south porch was enlarged in 1970. From the porch, a glazed corridor extends westward to a large hall designed by Jackson Greenen Down & Partners in 1992, employing similar design principles to the new nave.

The church cost approximately £5,000 to build—relatively inexpensive for a church at that date—with construction undertaken by Mr McWilliam of Bournemouth and carving executed by Richard Lockwood Boulton. George Evans (c. 1800–73), who succeeded his father William Evans as County Surveyor of Dorset in 1842, was joined by Walter John Fletcher (c. 1842–1913) before 1868.

St Mark stands like an estate church in an expansive churchyard planted with mature pines and surrounded by woodland through which the cottages of Talbot village are scattered. The original village comprised six farms, seven almshouses, a school, and nineteen cottages, each provided with a well, pigsty, and acre of land. The cottage designs drew principally from J.C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (1834). The Talbot Village Trust continues as a charitable foundation. Extensive late 20th-century alterations and extensions have been undertaken.