Church Of St Paul And Attached Walls, Gates And Piers

A church of 1853-61 designed in the Early English style by Sir George Gilbert Scott, located on Malmesbury Road in Chippenham.

The building is constructed of limestone ashlar for the tower, with coursed rubblestone and freestone bands and dressings to the rest of the structure. The roof is of stone slate with coped gables and finials. The plan consists of a six-bay aisled nave, a two-bay chancel, a north vestry with a tall stone stack offset in three stages, and a tower positioned at the front right (south-east) corner.

The exterior features four-light pointed-arched windows to the east and west ends, each with offset gabled buttresses to the centres. Two-light windows to the aisles and clerestory are separated by offset buttresses. A gabled porch marks the north door. The aisles have parapets with five dragon gargoyles. The east gable end bears a fretted cross finial, while the west has a fleur-de-lis.

The tower, 57 metres high at the south-east end of the south aisle, rises in four stages with diagonal buttresses offset at each stage. It serves as a porch and features an elaborately moulded plinth. The south side has a pointed-arched entrance; the second stage contains two lancet windows; the third stage has a clock; and the fourth stage has paired louvred bell openings. A corbel table supports the parapet of a broach spire with gabled two-light openings oriented to the compass points.

The interior is virtually unaltered apart from the removal of the organ and the addition of some twentieth-century screens. The windows are diagonally leaded and feature particularly fine nineteenth and early twentieth-century stained glass.

The chancel has a close-raftered roof with curved ashlar pieces and soulaces forming virtually a pointed-arched barrel roof. The reredos to the east wall consists of thirteenth-century-style stone panelling flanked by octagonal piers with domed finials. The three-light stained glass window above dates to 1905; the stained glass window to the south wall of the chancel is late nineteenth-century. The floor is laid with richly decorated polychromatic tiles. The chancel contains oak choir stalls and a communion rail supported by wrought-iron piers and elaborately panelled reader's stalls.

A winding stone stair to the left leads through an offset shouldered arch to the stone pulpit positioned in the angle of the north-east corner of the nave. The pulpit is octagonal with trefoil-headed openings to each facet and ball-type carving to the hollow mouldings. The cornice below has foliate bosses at the angles; the plinth is broached onto a square base. The high six-bay nave has king-post trusses with soulaces and ashlars to the rafters. Ornamental hammerbeam trusses span the walls of the east and west ends, their braces resting on stone corbels that articulate paired two-light clerestory windows. The cylindrical piers have round bases, broached octagonal plinths on square slabs, and round capitals with octagonal abaci supporting pointed arches with head stops to the hoodmoulds. Piers against the east and west walls are half-octagonal with foliate stops. At the south-east angle is a similar offset arrangement over a niche. The aisles have pointed-arched bracing on stone corbels on the outer walls and piers. The west wall incorporates twentieth-century oak panelling with four figures on columns below nineteenth-century paired windows and a circular window above containing three trefoils with rich stained glass. Toward the west ends of the aisles, the north and south doors are enclosed with twentieth-century oak panelled lobbies; the south lobby is located in the porch at the base of the tower.

The vestry, at the north-east corner, is divided from the north aisle by a panelled oak screen and doors bearing a memorial plaque to a curate who died in the First World War.

The south porch at the base of the tower has a diagonal red-and-black tiled floor and a panelled timber ceiling. The door, planked on the outside with chamfered panels on the inside, has elaborate wrought-iron hinges. Furnishings include an oak eagle lectern, a hemispherical stone font on a round base with octagonal plinth at the east end (both possibly by Gilbert Scott), and two late nineteenth-century Gothic chairs resembling thrones. The original numbered pine pews remain.

Attached to the south-west corner of the tower, dividing the forecourt from the churchyard, are arrow-headed railings with trellissed cast-iron piers supporting double gates. To the left, fronting the church to east and north, is a plinth of former railings. To the right, a squared rubblestone wall approximately one metre high with chamfered capping encloses the churchyard, extending southward for approximately 100 metres, curving to the east and north for approximately 80 metres. Gate piers at each end and on the curve have gabled caps with trefoil panels.

Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) was a nationally and internationally important architect best known for his Victorian church designs inspired by Medieval architecture, influenced directly by A W N Pugin and Benjamin Webb. He is perhaps most famous for his design of the Albert Memorial in London, completed in 1872. The church is marked on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1886, standing at the far corner of a rectangular shaped graveyard enclosed by a wall.