Parish Church of St Andrew

Parish Church of St Andrew

Parish church built between 1892 and 1897 to designs by the architects Fulford, Tait and Harvey, with the west end completed by W.D. Caröe in 1929–1930. A tall town church in the Free French Gothic style with Arts and Crafts details.

The church is constructed from local red snecked breccia with yellow sandstone dressings, and is roofed in red tile with original cast-iron rainwater goods.

The plan comprises a nave, chancel, north and south two-bay transepts, north and south five-and-a-half-bay aisles, a north-east lady chapel, a south-east vestry, and a south-west entrance.

The exterior is distinguished by a deep battered plinth. The chancel is buttressed with a central buttress featuring set-offs and a gable beneath a traceried roundel window. At basement level there are ogival-headed slit windows and doorways with depressed ogival heads. The south return of the chancel features an unusual paired lancet window in a stone recess with a buttress-like central detail, and a gabled stone bellcote. The Lady Chapel has a semi-circular end and conical tiled roof, with three trefoil-headed windows set in round-headed arches with a moulded string below the sills.

The easternmost bay of the north aisle forms the heavily buttressed base of an unconstructed tower, roofed over with a hipped roof with deep eaves on timber brackets above louvred panels. The north transept displays two gables to the north with round windows containing free flamboyant tracery. The north aisle is divided between two eastern buttressed bays with a lean-to roof and a western baptistry section. The eastern bays have square-headed three-light windows, while the baptistry contains a two-light transomed window with cusped lights in a square-headed frame. The nave features a clerestory with two pairs of windows to each buttressed bay, with cusped arched heads. The south side has a comparable transept and two-bay eastern aisle section. To the west is a south porch with a canted corner and segmental-headed arch, with a three-light square-headed cusped window above.

The east end contains a flat-roofed wrap-around vestry with parapet and small two- and three-light windows with an east-return doorway. The west end is buttressed and features a two-light window in a three-centred stone frame, each light with Y tracery and cusped head, and a traceried roundel in a square frame in the gable. Steps rise to a projecting west porch with angle buttresses and a moulded arched doorway recessed under a segmental stone arch serving as a porch hood.

Internally, a moulded chancel arch on shafts is supported on corbels carved with six-winged angels. The arcade arches are moulded with alternating octagonal and cylindrical piers adorned with detached Purbeck shafts. The clerestory windows have internal trefoil-headed arches on shafts. The chancel contains a two-bay archway into the Lady Chapel with a blind vessica in the tympanum. The transepts are roofed with keeled roofs; the nave has a keeled boarded wagon roof.

The fittings include a 1950s reredos, a mosaic chancel floor, sedilia with timber canopy, and choir stalls with carved bench ends. A marble chancel rail features brattished ironwork. The pulpit, by Hems and Son of Exeter, is lavishly executed with an octagonal bowl inlaid with marble and alabaster figures in niches. An octagonal late medieval font, formerly from the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, retains its 15th-century bowl on a replaced stem. An elaborate timber font cover, designed by Caröe and dated 1912 (disused at the time of survey), displays figures in niches with crocketed pinnacles and gables.

The church contains a good set of late 19th-century stained glass alongside attractive Art Nouveau leaded glass in the heads of some of the plain windows.