The Parish Church Of St Mary Magdalene

The Parish Church of St Mary Magdalene at West Lavington is a parish church built in 1850 by the architect William Butterfield, with later alterations.

The church is constructed of Wealden sandstone, squared and snecked, with freestone dressings. The belfry and porch are of oak, and the roof is covered in clay tiles.

The building follows a simple plan with a three-bay aisled nave, a south porch, and a chancel with a vestry to the north.

The exterior displays the Plain Geometric Gothic style characteristic of Butterfield's work. The nave and aisles are sheltered under a single canted roof without a clerestory. The west front features angle buttresses and a three-light west window with intersecting tracery, above which rises a shingled belfry with a pyramidal roof resting on plain stone corbels. Both the north and south aisles have single stepped buttresses, with windows comprising two elongated cusped lights and a quatrefoil above. The chancel has single buttresses to north and south, and windows of two uncusped lights with a quatrefoil. The east end is furnished with clasping buttresses, a three-light window with three quatrefoils, stone coping and a cross finial. The south porch is constructed of stone and timber with open timber tracery and benches within. The south door, set within an archway of two orders with a hood-mould, features heavy strapwork hinges.

Inside, the walls are now painted white, obscuring Butterfield's original stencilling. The nave arcades display tall double-chamfered pointed arches springing from octagonal piers with carved capitals. Corbels forming the east responds carry delicate carvings of fern-fronds. The double-chamfered chancel arch springs from two outsize corbels of Sussex marble with thick vegetal carving, emerging from colonettes integral with a low blind-traceried chancel screen of the same material, its upper portion now missing. The south wall of the chancel contains two stone sedilia and a triangular-headed piscina, while the vestry has an arched cupboard recess with a foliated finial above. The floor comprises red and black quarry tiles, with patterned encaustic tiles in the chancel. The nave roof is of crown-post construction, and the chancel roof has close-set polygonal trusses.

All fixtures and fittings are by Butterfield: simple pews with shaped ends; choir stalls with blind-traceried frontals; an octagonal timber pulpit with tracery carving and stone steps; an octagonal font of Sussex marble on a star-shaped limestone base with four marble colonettes beneath a pyramidal timber cover; brass communion rails with twisted uprights; and a high altar reredos of coloured and painted marble, added to Butterfield's design in 1882.

The church contains extensive stained glass. Ten windows are by AWN Pugin, dating from 1850 to 1852, featuring patterned grisaille in the north and south aisles; three angels in medallions amid grisaille in the west window; saints beneath canopies in the north and south chancel windows; and New Testament scenes in medallions at the east end of the south aisle. In the south aisle, two further windows are by Lavers and Westlake (1897) and Burlison and Grylls (1917), depicting large figures of saints in canopies. The east window, by Powells of Whitefriars (1915), shows Christ the Saviour with St Mary the Virgin and St Mary Magdalene.

The church contains a number of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century brass plaques, and two war memorial tablets at the west end of the nave.

The church of St Mary Magdalene was built in 1850 to serve an outlying part of the parish of Woolavington-with-Graffham, becoming a parish church in its own right the following year. Its construction was directed and financed by Charles Laprimaudaye, a wealthy local curate and ardent Anglo-Catholic who was received into the Church of Rome in 1851, followed closely by the then Rector of Woolavington and Archdeacon of Chichester, Henry Edward Manning, who later became a Cardinal. Their religious affiliations guided their choice of architect: William Butterfield, then 35 years old, was simultaneously at work on All Saints', Margaret Street in London, the flagship church of the Ecclesiological Society, and went on to design numerous monuments of Victorian High Anglicanism including Keble College at Oxford, Rugby School, and the cathedrals at Perth in Scotland and Melbourne in Australia. Butterfield also designed the adjoining rectory, now Redwood House. AWN Pugin, a Catholic convert since 1835, provided designs for many of the original windows produced by Hardman & Co.

In 1865 the reformer Richard Cobden was buried in the churchyard, with the future Prime Minister William Gladstone among his pallbearers. In 1882 the present reredos was installed to a design by Butterfield, and a number of memorial windows and plaques were added in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, the interior was painted white, obscuring Butterfield's original stencilling, and the upper part of the chancel screen was removed. The church was declared redundant in 2008 and is now closed for worship, although it remains consecrated.