Church of St Michael and All Angels

The Church of St Michael and All Angels is a large and splendid Gothic Revival church built between 1865 and 1868 by the architect Rhode Hawkins. It was constructed as a chapel of ease to the parish church of St David's, financed by William Gibbs of Tyntesfield in Somerset, one of the wealthiest men in Victorian England who made his fortune in the South American guano trade. Gibbs was a deeply religious man of Tractarian (High Church Anglican) persuasion who used his wealth to promote Anglo-Catholic mission work in poor urban areas. This church represents a major example of his munificence, alongside his better-known work funding Keble College, Oxford.

The church is built of snecked ashlar local grey limestone with Ham stone dressings, and has slate roofs with crested clay ridge tiles. It follows a plan of nave with north and south aisles, chancel, crossing tower and spire, north and south transepts, and a south vestry. Built in the Geometrical Gothic style of the late 13th to early 14th century, it forms a prominent landmark in Exeter, its soaring 220-foot-high steeple visible over long distances. This steeple was inspired by the great 14th-century spire at Salisbury Cathedral.

The crossing tower rises above the body of the church and features pairs of two-light belfry windows whose lower parts are filled with quatrefoil-pierced screenwork, while the heads of the openings contain cinquefoil-cusped circles. The tower is crowned by a blind quatrefoil frieze, above which rises the spire. This is of broach type, but the broaches are largely obscured by octagonal stone-capped pinnacles. Behind these rise further square gabled pinnacles with stone cappings. The spire has a tier of lucarnes (small windows) in the cardinal directions at its base, two bands of saltire crosses running around it, and ribs at the angles. A polygonal stair-turret in the angle between the aisle or nave and the south transept rises to the base of the belfry stage.

The nave and aisles extend for six bays, each bay demarcated by buttresses which rise across the slope of the narrow lean-to aisles and terminate in gabled finials near the top of the clerestory. Each aisle bay has a single lancet window, while the clerestory has large two-light windows with a cinquefoiled circle in the head. The west bay of the building forms an internal narthex, hence there is a door on the south side.

The west elevation features a large, ornate west portal with a trumeau—a central shaft with foliage capital and shaft ring that separates two arched entrances. The superarch of the portal is moulded and richly decorated, with two orders of shafts in the jambs, also with foliage capitals and shaft rings. A large figured roundel fills the head of the portal. Either side of the portal are two arches containing glazed cinquefoiled circles in the heads and blind trefoiled arches below with narrow slit windows. Above the portal runs a band of blind trefoiled arcading spanning the width of the nave between its buttresses. Rising partly into the nave gable is a large circular window enclosing six foiled circles.

The transepts have two-light windows in their north and south faces with a circular cinquefoiled window above. These two-light windows feature unusual tracery with a small quasi-rectangular piece infilling the junction between the main trefoiled lights and the three cusped circles above. A similar design is repeated in the three windows of the chancel clerestory. The east window is of five lights with one large and two small cusped circles in the head. The south vestry sits under its own gable. The principal parts of the church have low parapets filled with quatrefoil decoration matching the frieze at the top of the tower.

The interior is very tall and is plastered and whitened. A west gallery spans the west end, dividing off the west bay of the nave to form a narthex. In its general character this gallery mirrors the lower parts of the west front, with a double-entrance portal containing a roundel depicting St Michael defeating the Devil, below which are two arch heads with adoring angels. Flanking the portal are two arches of two lights with quatrefoils in the heads and openings at the level of the cusping below, the lights blocked by masonry beneath this point.

Between the nave and passage aisles are five arches supported on circular piers with ornate foliage capitals that are square in section with chamfered corners. The arches have two orders of sunk quadrant mouldings. Above the arches runs a continuous hood with very delicate and ornate foliage carving in its valleys and terminations. The nave is covered by a steeply pitched roof with arch-braces to a collar. Stone wall-posts to the roof rise from corbels just below a string-course beneath the clerestory window sills. At the east end of the nave, rising almost to the collar of the roof, is a tall plain arch. Beyond this are two equally tall similar arches leading to the transepts and to the chancel. The roofs in the transepts and chancel are also of arch-braced type. The floors are of red and black quarry tiles in the nave and aisles, and encaustic and multi-coloured tiles in the chancel.

The chancel is treated with exceptional richness. At the east end stands a reredos of 1899 by William Douglas Caröe, then working at the mother church of St David's. It features a large roundel depicting Christ in Glory with pink Devon marble shafts at its sides, flanked by walls each bearing six square representations of the Apostles. In the north-east corner of the chancel, in emulation of medieval precedents, is the founder's tomb under a broad arch. The effigy of William Gibbs, who died in 1882, carved in white marble by the noted sculptor Henry Hugh Armstead, lies within. In the south-east part of the chancel are triple sedilia with Devon marble shafts and highly ornate trefoiled heads with straight-sided crocketed canopies above. Extensive chancel mural decoration on the east wall serves as a memorial to William Gibbs, executed by Frederick Drake. The stallwork remains intact, with poppy-headed ends and open iron frontals.

The pulpit, designed by Arthur William Blomfield in 1885, is of timber, large in scale, and has open sides each divided into three pierced sections with a pair of cinquefoiled circles above. The font, probably dating from the 1860s, is muscular and square, with fleurons on the bowl and roundels bearing the emblems of the Evangelists. Beneath is a thick, squat Devon marble base with a spreading stiff-leaf capital, and the base is square with foliage in the spurs. The 19th-century east and west windows are the work of the well-known London makers Ward and Hughes.

To the west of the church stands a large and very fine complex of former almshouses.

The architect Rhode Hawkins was born in 1820 or 1821 and died in 1884. He practised from London, and his works, spanning the period 1848 to 1881, include mainly churches but also the vast Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum in Wandsworth, London, built in 1857-59.