Church Of Saint Alban

Church of Saint Alban

This small mission church was built between 1914 and 1916 to the designs of Thomas Falconer, a prominent Arts and Crafts architect based at Amberley near Stroud. It was erected as a memorial to Father A.H. Stanton, a curate at St Alban the Martyr in Holborn, London, who died on 28 March 1913 aged 74. Stanton had worked for fifty years among London's poor and was regarded as one of the most powerful preachers in the capital, his death being reported in the New York Times. The foundation stone was laid by his sister, Miss E.R. Stanton, in June 1915. Despite Stanton's high church principles, the mission church appears to have been only moderately high Anglican in practice. Since 1999 it has been shared with a Methodist congregation.

Exterior

The church is constructed of whitish limestone with pantiled roofs, and is most unexpectedly styled in the Byzantine manner for a Cotswold wool town. The exterior is plain to the point of severity. The main structure is a rectangular gabled box in five bays, with its sides handled as five shallow recessed panels, each containing high up a stepped three-light window with round arches. At the east gable stands a small, low apsidal sanctuary, blind-walled and surmounted by a bell-shaped semi-dome reminiscent of a Greek island chapel. A bellcote and chimney rise above the eaves at the south-east angle.

Attached to the south is a church room, a long single-storey structure with a flat parapet and seven cross-windows. The outer wall of this room survives from a parish poorhouse of 1724, retaining some blocked two-light mullioned windows low down. At its west end is the former main entrance, comprising double doors in a moulded frame with a three-light window above, all set within a framing arch.

A modern entrance and hall, designed by Peter Meers & Partners in 1982–3, adjoin the church to the north but are not of special interest.

Interior

The interior is a simple box-like nave with little architectural treatment beyond the windows. The boarded timber roof features simple trusses. The bare rubble walls are carefully laid, with radial masonry above the windows. The panels below the windows and the semi-dome of the apse are plastered and painted.

The easternmost bay serves as the chancel, separated from the nave by a low screen wall of bare rubble stone with canted bays projecting either side of the central opening. Both bays carry two large iron brackets on their east faces, possibly for a removable lectern and prayer desk. The entrance from the south creates an interesting subsidiary space, featuring a steep staircase beneath a sloping groin-vault. A landing halfway up gives onto a recessed vaulted bay at right angles, with the entrance doors to the church room.

Principal Fixtures and Fittings

Dominating the interior is a sturdy post-and-lintel screen sitting on the chancel wall. It carries large flat rood figures painted by Henry Payne around 1915, and was itself redecorated in strong colours with pattern and gilding around 2000. The stone font is large and square, tapering out at the top, with panels of guilloche ornament at the rim. An organ case and stone pulpit were designed by Peter Falconer (Thomas's son) in 1949. On the entrance staircase is a stone memorial tablet to Father A.H. Stanton with a segmental arched top. All the main doors are panelled, with upper panels glazed in attractive geometric patterns.

History and Alteration

Thomas Falconer trained under George & Yeates before establishing his practice at Amberley near Stroud in 1909, where he produced solid and worthy houses in the Arts and Crafts tradition. His choice of the Byzantine style for St Alban was unusual and perhaps influenced by J.F. Bentley's Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral. It reflected a broader desire to find new architectural expressions at a time when Gothic no longer held exclusive association with the High Anglican movement but had become the default style for religious buildings across denominations.

In 1971, 19th-century bench pews from St Laurence, Stroud were imported into the church. A reordering around 2000 removed these pews along with Falconer's stalls of 1932, and introduced new fittings and a turquoise colour scheme. A black and white photograph held at the church documents the interior post-1949, when the rood screen was plain and pale coloured.