Church Of All Saints

Church of All Saints, built 1838-40 by the London architect John Henry Taylor, is constructed of limestone ashlar with slate roofs. The building comprises a nave, chancel, transepts and a north vestry.

The main south-facing façade displays the five-bay nave, south transept and chancel to the road. The church exemplifies the plain lancet architecture popular in the 1830s, which reused medieval detail without archaeological accuracy. Most striking is the curious heightening of the end gables of the nave and transepts, rising far higher than structural necessity dictates, creating effect but with a strangely disembodied character that was mocked by Pugin in his polemical volume Contrasts. The gables are flanked by pinnacles. The moulded south doorway is placed in the south transept and flanked by buttresses, with a high-set two-light cusped window above it. The five-bay nave has buttresses with off-sets demarcating each bay, in which stands a deeply-set plain lancet window. The west end has a moulded doorway with a two-light Y-tracery window above. The transepts have two lancets in both their east and west walls. At the east end, a three-sided apse contains a lancet in each bay (the east window having cusped Y-tracery) with a buttress between the bays. All parts have plain parapets not structurally distinguished from the walls below.

Internally, the walls are plastered and whitewashed. The roofs feature arch-braces to a collar carrying a king-post to the ridge. The sanctuary is floored with attractive mosaic work, likely dating from the late 19th century. The major interior feature is the survival of galleries at the west end and in the transepts, each supported on cast-iron columns. The nave gallery occupies half its length. These galleries retain their original circa 1840 seating, though the fronts appear to have been replaced in later Victorian times. The seating in the body of the church was replaced around 1901 with benches having shaped ends that retain their original numbering (a reminder of individual seat appropriation), with umbrella holders and drip-trays at the ends. The wall behind the altar bears a tripartite arched reredos post-dating the church. Flanking the east window are panels containing the Ten Commandments, with the Lord's Prayer and Creed placed in arches beneath the windows of the apse canting.

A single-storey school by S S Teulon, built circa 1850 and enlarged to the south in 1867, stands to the east. Parish rooms of circa 1970 are situated to the north but detached from the church.

The church was built to provide additional Anglican accommodation as Sidmouth's population expanded in the early and mid-19th century. John Henry Taylor (circa 1792-1867) was a London-based practitioner with his office in Parliament Street, who served as president of the Surveyors' Club in 1838 and was one of the founding members of the RIBA in 1834. He exhibited the designs for All Saints at the Royal Academy in 1835 and 1838. The building remains little altered externally since its opening.