Church of St Helen

The Church of St Helen is a parish church of 1896, built by J. Norton for H.G. Heaven, the owner of Lundy Island. It is constructed of granite ashlar with slate roofs, crested ridge tiles, and stone-coped gable ends.

The church is designed in the Victorian Gothic Early English style and is oriented northwest-southeast. The plan includes a nave with a porch under a tower at the northwest corner of the nave, a chancel, and a transept vestry on the north side. The nave has two-light plate tracery windows on its north and south sides, with two lancet windows to the west, topped by a rose window whose tracery has been blocked. The transept vestry has a two-light window in its gable, also with plate tracery, and a lean-to porch in the northeast angle with a shouldered head doorway. The large, three-stage, unbuttressed tower has battlements, a square stair turret with battlements in the nave angle, gargoyles at the corners, and large two-light bell openings with trefoil heads and slate louvres. A clock face is at the first stage, above a niche containing a figure of St Helena. Beneath this is a deeply chamfered two-centred arch doorway to the porch, with wooden gates; the inner doorway has a four-arch design.

Inside, the walls are polychrome brick, featuring alternating bands of red brick with black and white diapering. The moulded stone chancel arch has dogtooth decoration and colonnettes supported by capitals on stone corbels. The roof is boarded, with principals resting on stone corbels. Furnishings are by Hermes of Exeter. The reredos features three cusped arches on Purbeck marble colonnettes with alabaster carving, depicting the Last Supper. Other features include a piscina, a sedilia, an altar rail with wrought iron standards, a low stone screen, a carved stone pulpit, a square font, complete benches including choir stalls, a carved wooden eagle lectern, and an organ on the south side of the chancel.

The east window is stained glass from around the late 19th century; the tracery is missing. Stained glass is also present in the rose window at the west end, one panel of which was designed and donated by Rev. H. Fleming St. John. Ornate wrought-iron lamp brackets are on the north and south walls of the nave. Five bells, dated 1897, are now housed in the porch.