Church Of St John The Baptist

The Church of St John the Baptist is an Anglican parish church dating from 1870-71, designed by T.H. Wyatt. It was built on the site of a former Medieval chapel. The church is constructed of limestone ashlar with a tiled roof.

The building comprises a nave and aisles, a south-west tower with a spire over the entrance, a chancel, and a south vestry. The south doorway, at the base of the tower, features a roll-moulded pointed archway with attached shafts topped with stiff-leaf capitals. The three-stage tower has angle buttresses and string courses. The second stage has a chamfered lancet window and an octagonal clock face. The bell stage has a two-light plate tracery window with attached shafts and louvres, a Lombard frieze to the cornice, and a plain four-sided spire. The south aisle has two two-light plate tracery windows with gables to a lean-to roof; the nave clerestory has three lancet windows. The gabled south vestry includes a shouldered doorway and a lancet with a quatrefoil above, a square ashlar stack, and two shouldered windows on its east side. The chancel has a lancet on the south side and three lancets with attached shafts and a multifoil in a moulded surround to the east end, with angle buttresses and a coped verge featuring a cross finial. The north side features two lancets. The north aisle mirrors the south aisle in design, having three windows and five lancets to the clerestory. The west end has a roll-moulded pointed doorway with double planked doors, flanked by pairs of attached shafts, with a gabled hood, an Agnus Dei carving, and a stiff-leaf finial. Lancet windows are positioned either side of the doorway, above which is a multifoil. A cylindrical stair turret with chamfered loopholes is located in the north-west angle between the south aisle and the tower.

Inside, the porch below the tower has a pointed roll-moulded arch with double planked doors leading to the nave, as well as segmental-headed planked doors to the stairs and the south aisle. The nave’s five-bay arch-braced collar roof has scissor trusses to the half-bays and exposed rafters. There is a five-bay double-chamfered north arcade on cylindrical piers, while the three-bay south arcade has an organ filling the eastern bay and lean-to aisle roofs with exposed rafters. Interior walls are rendered with ashlar dressings and stone floors. The chancel arch is roll-moulded and hollow-chamfered, with marble shafts and a hood mould with foliated terminals. The chancel features a three-bay arch-braced collar truss roof, exposed ashlar walls, a polychrome tiled floor, two-seat trefoil-headed sedilia on the south walls, a roll-moulded pointed doorway to the vestry, and east windows with rere-arches on pink marble shafts with stiff-leaf capitals. Fittings include a 19th-century wrought iron and wood communion rail, a pulpit with wooden open arcading on a stone base, original pews, and an 1870s cylindrical stone font with carved decoration on four marble shafts around a central stone column. Some classical marble wall tablets, originally from an earlier church, have been reset, including memorials to James Ames (died 1818) and Ruth Hunter (died 1794). The church was paid for by the Marchioness of Westminster as a memorial to the Marquess of Westminster of Fonthill Abbey.