Wanstead

Four churches all, apart from Holy Trinity, lnk and all new build the best of which is the neo classical C18 St Mary (but the interior sounds even better).

ST MARY. A church worthy in its appearance of the noble aspiration of the mansion. Built in 1790 by Thomas Hardwick, in a classical style, clearly of Gibbs derivation. Ashlar-faced throughout. Tall porch of two pairs of Tuscan columns. Pediment and fine circular bell turret with pairs of columns in the diagonals. Windows in two storeys corresponding to the wooden galleries inside. Interior of five bays of tall Corinthian columns on high pedestals. The columns carry arches, the ceiling is coved. Narrower chancel. - PULPIT. Lovely, with sounding board carried on two palmtree columns. - High BOX PEWS. - COMMUNION  RAILS and COMMUNION RAILS of wrought iron. - PLATE. Set of Queen Anne date converted to its present appearance in 1790. - MONUMENTS. The monument to Sir Josiah Child d. 1699 is one of the show pieces of the period. Attributed by Mrs Esdaile to John van Ost or Nost. Large reredos back. On the pedestal the reclining figure of a son of Sir Josiah and two allegories. Higher up stands Sir Josiah in Roman vestments and wig. Corinthian columns l. and r. and open, broken segmental pediment with Fames reclining on it. All the ornamental carving very fine. - George Bowles d. 1817, by Chantrey (on the gallery). Large seated female and next to her on a high pedestal bust in profile.

CHRIST CHURCH, High Street. 1861 by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Spire, S aisle etc. a little later. The church stands in the Recreation Ground, unconcerned with any houses around, like a model in an exhibition. The Victorians liked that. Ragstone with N tower with spire. The windows have plate tracery. Low quatrefoil piers. Three separate roofs for nave and aisles.

ST GABRIEL, Aldersbrook Road. 1914 by Charles Spooner. Red brick. Good Neo-Perp with pretty fléche.

HOLY TRINITY. Hermon Hill. 1887-9 by J‘. Fowler. Neo-Norman, an unusual thing at that time, with NW tower standing outside the aisle.

St Mary the Virgin

Christ Church

St Gabriel

Holy Trinity

WANSTEAD. London has flowed into it, but has not been able to engulf this ancient place, for it is protected on all sides by forest land and open spaces, Wanstead Park and Wanstead Flats, and a lake-filled corner of Epping Forest.

A colony of over a hundred herons has settled in the park, of which 200 acres belong to the City of London; we could scarcely have believed in these cockney herons had we not seen their nests, 60 of them. The park was beautifully laid out by Richard Child, first Earl Tylney, whose father and brother we find in the church, but the gorgeous house he built has gone these hundred years. Louis the Eighteenth and his queen lived in it, refugees during the Napoleon wars, when they lived chiefly at Hartwell in Bucks. In an earlier house standing on this site took place the marriage of the Earl of Leicester and the Countess of Essex, of which no one dared tell Queen Elizabeth for a year, so much had she wished to marry the man herself.

Among the new shops in the High Street are some 18th century homes, one the manor house with a beautiful hooded doorway; and for contrast there is a tiny timbered cottage of the 17th century 14 feet by 7. The Spanish chestnuts on the green are much older than the church they lead us to, a classical building of 1790 with a pillared porch and a cupola. Under a richly carved canopy is a rare three-
decker pulpit. There are some Chippendale chairs, a beautiful lectern, and a modern candelabra presided over by a two-headed eagle. A portrait in relief shows George Bowles, a lover of art who died in 1817.

Almost filling a wall of the chancel is the monument of Josiah Child and his son Bernard, who both appear in Roman costume, one lying on a shelf, the other standing on a pedestal with angels blowing trumpets above his head. Sir Josiah, a City merchant and economist (but not the banker) died in 1699. He was for a time Governor of the East India Company, one of whose chaplains lies in the churchyard. The chaplain is James Pound, whose account of the mutiny of Indian troops on the Pulo Condore Islands is treasured in the Bodleian. He lost all in the insurrection, returned to England, became rector of Wanstead, and soon made a name as an astronomer. The Royal Society lent him a telescope, and Sir Isaac Newton procured the maypole from the Strand for him to mount it on. He fired his curate, James Bradley, with the same enthusiasm, and had he lived he would have had the joy of seeing this much-loved nephew succeed Edmund Halley as Astronomer-Royal.

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Stratford

St John, open, is a huge barn of a Victorian church - I found it dire but bonus points for being open.

ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST, Broadway. 1834 by Blore. E.E. with lancets; yellow brick. Tall and ornate SW spire. Thin many-moulded piers with depressed arches. Clerestory and thin tiebeams with tracery. MARTYRS’ MEMORIAL in the churchyard, 1879 by J. T. Newman. Polygonal with angle-shafts and top-heavy spire.

WEST HAM. This big and densely peopled part of Greater London has great docks and great industries, and a population  of nearly a third of a million. It includes Forest Gate and Silvertown, and is divided from London by the River Lea, crossed by the wide successor of the famous Bow Bridge. This is said to have been the first arched stone bridge in Essex, and was kept in repair by the monks of Langthorne Abbey, of which some 13th century window stones are built into a wall near the Adam and Eve inn.

Chaucer would gaze on the abbey from his rooms on the City gate, and did not his tender-hearted prioress pronounce her French after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow? The borough boasts a poet of its own, whose name was Thomas Lodge. He gave up law for letters, and his sonnets and elegies, lyrics and plays, brought forth the praise of Edmund Spenser and Robert Greene (the forgotten man who was jealous of Shakespeare).

Thomas Lodge’s father was the Lord Mayor of London whose ships from Africa are said to have begun our trade in slaves, at that unhappy time when Stratford was burning men and women at the stake. The site of their martyrdom is at the busy cross-roads, and here in a churchyard is a lofty spire capped by a martyr’s crown. On one of the six sides is a relief of the burnings from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and the other sides give the names and dates of all the local victims who are known. Behind rises the tall pinnacled spire of plain looking St John’s church, one century old, and opposite is the high tower of the town hall, its dome 100 feet above the street, brooding over a balustraded roof with many statues.

Another statue stands outside the public library, for Stratford must have its Shakespeare, be he ever so small. For years the little figure stood in the vestibule of Drury Lane Theatre, and was saved when the building was burnt in 1809. The poet is stroking his beard in meditation, and bids us “Come and take choice of all my library.” The rest of the block is used as a college and museum, and there are symbolical figures carved in relief on its many gables. Along the front stands a row of pillars on a frieze decorated with cherubs.

The museum owes much to the Essex Field Club and John Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist whose bust faces us as we enter. The collections illustrate the natural history and antiquities of Essex, and there are many models for teaching children. This was possibly the first museum to stage a living exhibit of wild flowers and grasses, and these have been renewed without a lapse since the beginning of our century. The survey of the animal kingdom starts with the tusks and teeth of mammoths and the skulls and horns of bison, all from Essex, and with fossils from all over the world. One fine exhibit is a wonderful panorama of Epping Forest, complete with stuffed animals and birds and models of toadstools.

The works of man start with cumbersome flint implements dropped at Leyton thousands of years ago, and next we see how he learned to put handles on his tools. There are relics from his dwellings, and his implements of bone and bronze. One exhibit deals with the mysterious low mounds, about a foot high, which are found along the high water mark of the Essex coast. We see their contents, red earth and rough red pottery, supporting the theory that at these mounds earthenware was made for evaporating salt. Soon afterwards came the Romans, and we are shown various types of the pottery they introduced. Finally there are prints and photographs of old Essex abbeys and priories.

Flickr.

West Ham

Four churches - one old, three new, all lnk. I liked All Saints, old, a lot but the others were indifferent.

ALL SAINTS, Church Street. A complicated building history, given as follows by the Royal Commission: nave walls with blocked clerestory windows Norman. Arcades to the aisles mid C13, only five bays long. Nave lengthened to the E c. 1400. Circular piers, heavy moulded capitals, double-chamfered arches. S chancel chapel late C15 (octagonal piers). N chancel chapel, the most handsome piece of architecture of the church, c. 1550, of red brick with blue brick diapering and windows of three- and four-light with brick mullions and depressed-arched lights. Early C19 refacing of the S side of the church with yellow brick. The commanding W tower of ragstone with taller SE stair turret is of c. 1400. The nave roof has late C15 tiebeams; the chancel roof is of c. 1500. - REREDOS. 1866 by Sir G. G. Scott. - ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS from Stratford Langthorne Abbey: one two-light window, late medieval, near S Porch, one stone sculptured with skull, on inner N wall of tower. - PLATE. Set of 1693; Cup, Cover, and Almsdish of 1718; three Almsdishes of 1737. - MONUMENTS. Thomas Staples, d. 1592, brass with kneeling figures (E end of S arcade). - John Faldo d. 1613 and Francis Faldo d. 1632, two similar small monuments with kneeling figures (Chancel S wall). - William Fawcit d. 1631 and wife, and her second husband. Large monument with two kneeling figures, facing each other as usual and the first husband semi-reclining below (N Chancel Chapel). - Thomas Foot, Lord Mayor of London, d. 1688 and wife. Two life-size standing figures in niches with black inscription plate between, the whole under a pediment (N Chancel Chapel). - Buckeridge Children d. between 1698 and 1710. Kneeling figures of the parents, one kneeling daughter above. The other children small busts on pedestals. By Edward Stanton. - James Cooper d. 1743 and wife. Two life-size standing figures together in one niche under a pediment. The quality of the figures is excellent, and it is a great pity that they are not signed.

ST ANTONY, R.C., St Antony’s Road. By Pugin & Pugin 1887. Big, E.E., no tower.

EMMANUEL, Upton Lane and Romford Road, 1852 by Sir George Gilbert Scott.

All Saints

St Matthew

St Anthony of Padua

Emmanuel

WEST HAM. This big and densely peopled part of Greater London has great docks and great industries, and a population  of nearly a third of a million. It includes Forest Gate and Silvertown, and is divided from London by the River Lea, crossed by the wide successor of the famous Bow Bridge. This is said to have been the first arched stone bridge in Essex, and was kept in repair by the monks of Langthorne Abbey, of which some 13th century window stones are built into a wall near the Adam and Eve inn.

Chaucer would gaze on the abbey from his rooms on the City gate, and did not his tender-hearted prioress pronounce her French after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow? The borough boasts a poet of its own, whose name was Thomas Lodge. He gave up law for letters, and his sonnets and elegies, lyrics and plays, brought forth the praise of Edmund Spenser and Robert Greene (the forgotten man who was jealous of Shakespeare).

Thomas Lodge’s father was the Lord Mayor of London whose ships from Africa are said to have begun our trade in slaves, at that unhappy time when Stratford was burning men and women at the stake. The site of their martyrdom is at the busy cross-roads, and here in a churchyard is a lofty spire capped by a martyr’s crown. On one of the six sides is a relief of the burnings from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and the other sides give the names and dates of all the local victims who are known. Behind rises the tall pinnacled spire of plain looking St John’s church, one century old, and opposite is the high tower of the town hall, its dome 100 feet above the street, brooding over a balustraded roof with many statues.

Another statue stands outside the public library, for Stratford must have its Shakespeare, be he ever so small. For years the little figure stood in the vestibule of Drury Lane Theatre, and was saved when the building was burnt in 1809. The poet is stroking his beard in meditation, and bids us “Come and take choice of all my library.” The rest of the block is used as a college and museum, and there are symbolical figures carved in relief on its many gables. Along the front stands a row of pillars on a frieze decorated with cherubs.

The museum owes much to the Essex Field Club and John Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist whose bust faces us as we enter. The collections illustrate the natural history and antiquities of Essex, and there are many models for teaching children. This was possibly the first museum to stage a living exhibit of wild flowers and grasses, and these have been renewed without a lapse since the beginning of our century. The survey of the animal kingdom starts with the tusks and teeth of mammoths and the skulls and horns of bison, all from Essex, and with fossils from all over the world. One fine exhibit is a wonderful panorama of Epping Forest, complete with stuffed animals and birds and models of toadstools.

The works of man start with cumbersome flint implements dropped at Leyton thousands of years ago, and next we see how he learned to put handles on his tools. There are relics from his dwellings, and his implements of bone and bronze. One exhibit deals with the mysterious low mounds, about a foot high, which are found along the high water mark of the Essex coast. We see their contents, red earth and rough red pottery, supporting the theory that at these mounds earthenware was made for evaporating salt. Soon afterwards came the Romans, and we are shown various types of the pottery they introduced. Finally there are prints and photographs of old Essex abbeys and priories.

The fossils and birds in the museum would have delighted George Edwards, born here in 1694. He went to a clergyman’s school at Leytonstone, and read incessantly while he was apprenticed in the City. He travelled in Holland and Scandinavia, where he was seized as a spy, but he returned home to make coloured drawings of animals. He studied fossils, corresponded with Linnaeus, and spent 21  years writing a great History of Birds. He gave to the world 500 bird scenes never pictured before, and he worked on to the end; then they laid him to rest from his labours in the crowded churchyard of West Ham.

The church has a big square sundial of 1803 which bids us Remember, and for sunless wet days is a long cloister joining the south aisle to the road. The tower of about 1400 has been liberally patched with brick: at the top is a turret and at the bottom a doorway with traceried spandrels.

There are signs in the clerestory that the Normans built no mean church here, probably a dignified building with transepts; now the nave has round piers of the 13th century, and above them are many Tudor beams. The chancel roof was built about 1500, a century after the chancel arch. Medieval arcades divide the chancel from its flanking chapels: the south chapel is probably 15th century and the other 100 years younger, a brick turret rising above its walls.

All forlorn lies the disused bowl of a font of 1707, and very gruesome is a 15th century stone on the tower, carved with skulls.

On the chancel arch is an Elizabethan brass of Thomas Staples faced by four women. Beneath are 20 verses, one for every shilling he left as an annuity to the poor. In a round-headed recess in the chancel wall are kneeling figures of John and Francis Faldo who died 300 years ago, looking very small beside the later monuments. In the north chapel is a memorial with rich pilasters framing the armoured figure of Captain Robert Rooke and his two wives, with their seven children. In a niche is James Cooper with his wife; he has been reading a book for nearly 200 years. Below the arch of the chapel is a 15th century altar tomb, but who lies in it we do not know. Angels hold shields in carved panels round the sides, and the beer barrel and maltster’s shovel suggest an unknown brewer. There is no mistake about Sir Thomas Foot, who stands with his wife on a fine monument with a festooned urn. He was Lord Mayor of London in Restoration days, and wears his chain. Near by are cherubs adorning the monument of one of his successors, Sir James Smyth, who died in the reign of Queen Anne.

On the wall of the other chapel is a quaint 300-year-old group in a recess flanked by columns, showing a woman kneeling at a prayer desk with one of her husbands, while another husband reclines contentedly reading a book. A pathetic story must lie behind another monument in this chapel, where Nicholas and Eleanor Buckeridge set up their own tomb after losing five children. A kneeling girl on the cornice is flanked by busts of four infants, and below kneel their parents, who died over two centuries ago. They are descendants of that Thomas Buckeridge of the last Stuart reigns who wished to have his bones mingled with the ashes of his “dear and innocent child” at West Ham church. He was a friend of Godfrey Kneller and the Duke of Buckingham, and wrote the Lives of the English Painters.

Near the church is West Ham Park, 80 acres of green beauty, with many cedars over 150 years old. At the house called the Cedars lived Elizabeth Fry. West Ham Recreation Ground is a delightful park, its lawns gay with flowers, and in the middle plays a fountain surrounded by irises, a band plays under the trees, and children play everywhere.

But the name that shines above all others is Lord Lister’s. Here he was born, and his house facing Upton Park is marked by a tablet.

He Saved Millions of Lives

LISTER was one of the greatest benefactors of mankind, born in 1827, son of a gifted Quaker. He took his medical degree at 25, was professor of surgery at Glasgow eight years later, and returned to London to give the last 16 years of his working life to King’s College.

It was as a prince of surgeons that he devised the methods associated forever with his name. He worked in hospitals where 80 per cent of deaths followed operations, even minor breakings of the skin, and he saw the imperative need of surgical cleanliness. When Pasteur announced his discovery of fermentation from germs Lister realised that germs were responsible for the frightful consequences of operations. He sought out sterilising agents and prevented contact with the wounds by anything calculated to create septic conditions. Almost at once he reduced mortality by 65 per cent, and today his disciples feel it little short of a crime to lose life after an operation which before his day was almost certain to be fatal.

A brave and noble spirit, Lister worked patiently on in face of professional doubt and jealousy, content with the results and the gratitude of his patients. What he meant to them is tenderly expressed in a sonnet by W. E. Henley, who was for two years in his care. We give some lines from this poet’s proud homage:

His brow spreads large and placid, and his eye
Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still.
Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfil -
His face at once benign and proud and shy.
If envy scout, if ignorance deny,
His faultless patience, his unyielding will,
Beautiful gentleness, and splendid skill,
Innumerable gratitudes reply.
His wise, rare smile is sweet with certainties,
And seems in all his patients to compel
Such love and faith as failure cannot quell . . .

He was raised to the peerage, and long before he died was acclaimed throughout the world as the greatest healer of all time. Prejudice had died down and he was acknowledged the saviour of millions of lives. The first doctor in the House of Lords, he was President of the Royal Society and of the British Association, was one of the original members of the Order of Merit (the highest distinction the King bestows) and was laid to rest among princes and poets in Westminster Abbey.

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Plaistow

St Andrew was open but dull. Despite the Welcome sign and it being open the reception here was one of open hostility: to the extent that when I took a photo of a window in the porch I was told to delete it as internals could only be taken with permission from headquarters; not only that but when I was loading my next destination into my TomTom my number plate was taken (not literally).

This was my 867th church and whilst I've met suspicion and doubts before I've never encountered downright hostility. Bemused by the reception, I did some online research into UCKG, whose church this is, and can only surmise that they thought I was a journalist; whatever the visit was a very unpleasant experience.

ST ANDREW, Barking Road and St Andrew’s Road: 1870 by Brooks. Vicarage 1871. Neo-E.E. with crossing tower (unfinished), vaulted inside, and large apse. Short circular piers with four attached shafts with shaftrings and foliated capitals. Clerestory with shafted arcade. To the N and S of the crossing side chapels screened off by double arches with outsize tracery a la Butterfield.

No mention by Mee.

Canning Town

Now redundant St Luke is used as a surgery, a cafe and various offices which puts to good use a poor building.

ST LUKE, Jude Street. 1874-6 by Giles & Gane. Tall without tower. E.E. and with geometrical tracery. Yellow brick. Fléche as in Continental Friars' churches.

Another Mee omission.

Silvertown

Now used as the Brick Lane Music Hall St Mark was declared redundant in 1974 and in 1981 suffered a catastrophic fire before being restored in the late 80s. Architecturally it's indifferent.

ST MARK. 1861-2 by S. S. Teulon. As horrid as only he can be, and yet of a pathetic self-assertion in its surroundings. No lived-in house seems anywhere near. Yellow brick with bits of red and black brick. Nave with three tall dormers as clerestory windows. Low aisles. Crossing tower with pyramid roof and circular stair turret. Apse. Tracery partly of a harsh version of the plate variety, partly (bell-openings) fancy.

Mee doesn't mention it.

Little Ilford

To be honest St Mary the Virgin, lnk, struck me as being an unloved dying church but I'm not sure why, although I imagine changing demographics contribute; nowadays evangelical, charismatic Christianity and the other major faiths reflect the multicultural diversity around here and I suspect the CoE is losing ground.

Having said that I liked it and the interior sounds interesting - an unsurprising shame to find it locked.

However my No1 church of the day - although strictly speaking it's a temple - was the Sri Murugan Temple just around the corner, which is stunning.

ST MARY, Church Road, Manor Park. The parish church of Little Ilford A small church and not impressive, though loveable. Nave with bell-turret, cemented. Chancel rebuilt 1724. Of the same date the Lethieullier Chapel containing the fine MONUMENTS to John Lethieullier d. 1737, Smart Lethieullier d. 1760, and his wife. The two latter are slender urns, the centre is held by the red marble sarcophagus of John. The whole placed against an architecture with Tuscan columns and a pediment. The nave is of the C12, as seen in one N window. - BRASSES. Thomas Heron d. 1517, schoolboy with ink-horn and pen-case. - William d. 1614 and Ann d. 1630 Hyde, the infant boy in swaddling clothes. - MONUMENT. William Waldegrave d. 1610 and wife, with kneeling figures; not large.

 

Mee doesn't appear to mention it.

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Aldborough Hatch

Perhaps because it was the first church of the day I rather liked St Peter despite it being lnk (although the notice board does say that it's open on Weds 10-12) and entirely alien to Essex; I found its clean lines pleasing to the eye and think Pevsner's a bit harsh.

ST PETER, Aldborough Road. 1862 by Ashpitel. Small, very crude church of ragstone with little N turret at E end of nave in returning angle to chancel. - PLATE. Cup, Flagon and Almsdish from the chapel of Aldborough Hall, 1771.

Mee always, or rather usually, finds something positive whatever he finds:

One more modern church here, St Peter’s, we found at Aldborough Hatch near Barkingside, and it is interesting because it has in its walls some stones from old Westminster Bridge, the bridge on which Wordsworth stood when it seemed to him that Earth has not anything to show more fair.

Flickr.

Seven Kings

Another barn, and particularly unattractive, St John the Baptist, lnk, I think it might be redundant.

No mention by either Mee or Pevsner.

Ilford

Three churches, all lnk, all big, blousie and pretty poor examples of their kind. St Andrew is the best of a poor bunch and Pevsner is unusually generous.

ST ANDREW, The Drive. 1924 by Sir Herbert Baker. In comparison with Lutyens Baker may be one of the smaller fry. In a between-the-wars-suburban area a church such as St Andrew will at once be noticed as remarkable. Tall, red brick, with tall, slim W bell-turret and a copper-roofed baptistery apse between two round-arched entrances below. The interior has a low round-arched arcade with no capitals at the springing of the arches, a tall clerestory and a tall apse with two-light windows. That is: a frank mixture of Gothic and classical motifs.

ST LUKE, Uphall Road. 1941 by E. T. Dunn. Mr Goodhart-Rendel calls the church uncommonly fine, though entirely traditional.

St Andrew

St Alban the Martyr

St Luke

ILFORD. It has come into London, of course, and its 138 square miles is packed with 200,000 people; but only 100 years ago the River Roding was running through green pastures here and Ilford folk were going to service in the little medieval chapel of the Hospital of St Mary. It keeps its old chapel still, and it vies with the great new church in its appeal to pilgrims.

Among many other churches which have grown up are St Mary’s with an apse and a spire, and St Clement’s with its imitation Gothic; but the great monument of our time at Ilford is Sir Herbert Baker’s brick church of St Andrew’s.

Ilford is now the controlling centre of half-a-dozen places (Chadwell Heath, Seven Kings, Newbury Park, Barkingside, Goodmayes, Aldborough Hatch, and part of Becontree, the LCC’s great estate) and it has a town hall which ranks among the best civic buildings of outer London. It has also 1000 acres set aside for a great airport. Among its old places is what is left of the Hospital of St Mary, the little chapel kept in repair by the Marquis of Salisbury, who maintains the chaplain and provides for the six poor people who took the place of the lepers centuries ago. It is 15th century, and the oldest building in the town.

We come from the Roman highroad by a charming gateway to find their one-storeyed homes facing each other across a courtyard, with the chapel looking on. Their homes were new two centuries ago, and the chapel was made new in the 17th and 19th centuries, but the chancel remains wholly medieval, a tiny place 16 feet wide with glass in the windows three or four centuries old, showing the Madonna and St Elizabeth as gems of colour in the tracery. An old stone priest who is thought to be John Smythe, master of the Hospital 500 years ago, lies in his robes under a new canopy. The panelled back of his old tomb being now in a wall. There is a big modern painting of Christ on the Road to Calvary.

Sir Herbert Baker’s great church is set on Ilford’s highest point, with spacious streets about it. It is somewhat like Sir Herbert’s cathedral at Pretoria, and is 145 feet long and 80 feet high, with a small graceful spire of oak and lead. The copper-domed roof of the baptistry, rising between two entrance arches at the west end, is crowned with a bronze figure of Peace by Charles Wheeler, and the apse at the east end has Gabriel sounding his trumpet, designed in tiles by Henry Holiday.

The interior with its seven bays is like a basilica, with barrel roofs over narrow aisles lighted by round-headed windows, their arches all different. The baptistry recess has a roof in brick and tile suggesting great beams of light radiating from a panel of the Dove, by Phoebe Stabler, the architect’s gift to the church.

In the roof of the nave are six beams each weighing a ton. The roofs of the chancel and the soaring apse are of barrelled and vaulted brickwork, and the apse windows have exceptional grace. But the gem of the stained glass is a window in the north aisle showing the Madonna crowned. In this green and blue jewel Carl Parsons surpasses all his other windows here, but those on either side of the Madonna, one of Christ the Carpenter, the other of Solomon the Builder, are delightfully apt, for this chapel is the gift of the church’s own builder, Alfred Griggs, whose proud opportunity it was, as Mayor of Ilford, to hold his civic inauguration in this church of his own building. The chapel is a memorial to his parents and his brother Horace, an Ilford lad who meant to be a priest but gave his young life as a soldier. In one window we see him as a student at Oxford, in another as an officer in France, and the altar, lectern, and litany desk were all made with his hands for the church hall when he was quite a boy.

The wave of enthusiasm which set this fine church on the hill broke into a hundred gifts for it, and they are everywhere, so that the church has become a storehouse of memories. Remembered above all is Dr Edgar Jacob, the bishop who left his diocese of Newcastle to organise the church in this fast growing suburb of Greater London. The church is his monument, as it is also the monument of a group of fine modern craftsmen. Its beautiful woodwork was designed by Laurence Turner, the noble altar triptych by Colin Gill; the fine altar linen was done by a lady who worked at it for years and died a year or two before the church was consecrated.

We found another band of enthusiasts carrying on the health activities of Ilford in a 17th century house in Valentine’s Park, home of the vine from which Hampton Court’s famous great vine came. The parent stem died some years ago, but its offshoot bears its wondrous harvest of over a thousand pounds of grapes every year. One more modern church here, St Peter’s, we found at Aldborough Hatch near Barkingside, and it is interesting because it has in its walls some stones from old Westminster Bridge, the bridge on which Wordsworth stood when it seemed to him that Earth has not anything to show more fair.

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East Ham

Historically the London Boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Newham, Redbridge and Waltham Forest were in Essex (parts of the first two and last named still are)but no-one would nowadays regard Newham and Redbridge as being anywhere except east London - except for this blog but only for historic accuracy. I will be surprised if I find any of the remaining 35 churches open.

St Barnabas, locked no keyholder, Victorian three gabled church nothing to write home about but I've seen worse

St Mary Magdalene, lnk although I've subsequently read on their website that the key is available from the Nature Reserve office, looks fascinating - a revisit is needed. The 9½ acre graveyard is managed as a nature reserve which I applaud as a welcome introduction of green lungs in to the urban area.

Having said that the graveyard contains 60 CWGC headstones (actually I think there are more since I found one that is not mentioned on the CWGC site – SO Osbourne 1943) of which I found 11, the rest are lost in the wilderness and 3 of those are now illegible. This, it seems to me, is a crying shame and that respect to the fallen can, and should, be accommodated within the strictures of a nature reserve.

ST BARNABAS, Browning Road, Little Ilford. 1900-9 by Bucknell & Comper. Red brick. Fine quiet three-gable front with Perp windows. Interior wide with wide aisles, cool and competent. No chancel arch. Large Perp windows, four-lights even in the aisles.

ST MARY MAGDALENE, High Street South. It is surprising to find a prosperous medieval village church between an East-end suburb, a by-pass road, and the vast hump of the Northern Outfall Sewer. The W tower of the early C16, low, of big reddish rubble. The rest of the church essentially Norman, with masonry of large coursed rubble. Norman windows, deeply splayed inside, preserved on both sides. Nave wide and aisleless, lower and narrower chancel, and yet lower and narrower apse. The apse has two pilaster buttresses outside and a corresponding pilaster inside on the SE. Its plain moulding is identical with that of the W arch of the apse. It indicates that the apse was intended to be vaulted. In 1931 however a Norman ceiling was discovered above the apse. The chancel has inside as an enrichment intersecting arches with zigzag decoration, well preserved on the N side, hardly recognizable on the S. The W doorway of the Norman church is preserved. It leads now into the W tower. It is of three orders of columns with scalloped capitals. The S side of the chancel has a three-light brick window, probably of the C17. The nave windows are from the restoration of 1844-5. In the N chancel wall the remains of an opening of the early C16 towards an anchorite’s cell, in the S side of the apse a PISCINA of the C13. Double opening with trefoiled heads under pointed arch. - FONT. Bowl of 1639 on late C17 or early C18 baluster stem. - PAINTING. In the apse remains of early C13 wallpainting, imitating ashlar facing with red joints. In the arch to the apse small flowers and foliage frieze with head of Christ in the apex. -  PLATE. Cup of 1563; Cover of 1573; Cup and Cover 1623. - MONUMENTS. Brasses to Hester Neve d. 1610 and Elizabeth Heigham d. 1622. - Standing wall monument to Edward Nevill Earl of Westmorland, early C17, surrounded by the original iron  Two large kneeling figures facing each other, and kneeling children below. Alabaster, good quality. - William Heigham d. 1620 and wife, good alabaster monument with two standing cherubs; no effigies. - Giles Breame d. 1621, kneeling figures also facing each other, smaller than the Nevill tomb. - Higham Beamish d. 1723, plain against obelisk, signed by Nathaniel Hedges. - In the Churchyard William Stukeley, the antiquarian, is buried (d. 1765).

St Barnabas

St Mary Magdalene

EAST HAM. The ships of the world come to it, for its three docks (the Royal Albert, the King George the Fifth, and the Victoria) make up three sections of the biggest sheet of enclosed dock water in the world. The Royal Albert is a mile long and 500 feet wide, and the George the Fifth has 64 acres of water and 15 acres of warehouses. It was in the excavation for these docks that a canoe now in the British Museum was found, 27 feet long. It would be one of the earliest known boats on the Thames.

Across the river from here is a fine view of Kent, partly blocked by the six-mile embankment of a great sewer. Monstrous slag heaps such as are too often allowed to ruin our countryside make a grim background to the huge Beckton gasworks. One of our most industrial towns, it has little for the traveller to see, but its 70 or 80 miles of streets are fine and well kept, and planted with thousands of trees. There are 200 acres of open spaces, a Central Park of 25 acres, and Plashet Park a little smaller; it was the ground round Plashet House, the home of Elizabeth Fry when Plashet was a secluded hamlet. No trace of her home is left, but in our own time there has been discovered the rate-book of the house. The site itself is delightful with ornamental gardens. Near the Central Park is the memorial to the men of the Great War, whose names are on bronze tablets; there are 1669 of them. The Town Hall in the middle of the town (built of red brick with terracotta facings) has a fine clock tower, and inside are more memorials; one to four heroic men who gave their lives in trying to save one of their mates who worked for the council; another tablet is to 100 men who fell in the South African War, and with their names are Kipljng’s words, Lest We Forget. The technical college and grammar school is an impressive building, and there is a grammar school for girls, also nobly housed.

One of the most interesting old buildings in the town is Green Street House, at which Henry the Eighth stayed with Anne Boleyn. In those days the house was new, though the gables and cornices we see ‘are 17th century. There is panelling of 1600 in the passages and in three of the rooms, and from the same time is the fine staircase with high wooden vases on its heavy balusters. There are 17th century doors and doorways, and two Queen Anne fireplaces.

Those who would read of these things may do so in a fine Carnegie Library, which has in its entrance hall a bust of the noblest woman on East Ham’s roll of fame, Elizabeth Fry. She lived at Plashet House, of which only the grounds remain. Last century the Methodists raised a chapel to her memory in Plashet Grove, and St Stephen’s church was built in her honour about the same time. The church is rich in modern woodwork.

The mother church of the town is Norman, and is of remarkable interest, having Roman bricks, Norman timbers, and medieval painting. The windows of the bell-chamber tell us the tower is only 400 years old, but it has a rare 14th century bell inscribed with the name of Gabriel, and shelters a fine Norman doorway with three pairs of shafts crowned by cushion capitals.

The Roman bricks in the walls must have come from a Roman settlement near the site, and Roman relics have been found in the churchyard - perhaps the biggest churchyard in England still in use. The bricks were used by the Normans, whose handiwork is in four windows and an archway. On the outside chancel wall is the stone frame of a 13th century doorway, and the medieval iron window fastenings of a hermit’s cell. The doorway by which we come in has one scalloped capital carved by the Normans, and the porch has Tudor timbers in the roof. The nave has two Norman windows set in its thick walls, and one side has oak panelling carved with 17th century strapwork. The walls of the Norman chancel have a band of 13th century painting, and also 13th century are the red flowers on the walls of the Norman apse and on its deep window splays. It is above all this colour that we find the Norman timbers, a very unusual possession, found in only about a dozen churches in the country. They are heavy Norman beams, remaining as solid examples of carpentry in the original roof.

Along the chancel walls are remains of a lovely interlacing arcade of round arches with zigzag. Four arches are complete, but the others have been cut into for tombs, and for a Tudor doorway to the roodstairs. The apse has a 13th century bracket with a finely carved head which, with a Norman capital, has been fashioned into a pair of stone basins at which the priest would wash his hands.

The font has a quaint bowl given by Sir Richard Heigham in 1639, and in the chancel is a brass portrait of Sir Richard’s wife, his family crest on a helmet hanging above. A wall-stone with a gilt cherub is to Sir Richard’s daughter, and there is a brass of Hester Neve in Stuart dress. High on the chancel wall is a brightly painted monument with shields, pilasters, and obelisks giving it an air of dignity; in its arched recesses Charles Breame and his wife have been kneeling for over 300 years.

In a corner of the apse is the pretentious monument of a man who claimed to be an earl. It has its original iron railings, and eleven shields-of-arms. Above is an elaborate armorial achievement guarded by standing figures of Prudence and Hope, and below is an enriched recess with a carved helmet of red and black plumes set in front of a prayer desk. Here kneel Edmund Nevill and his wife Jane, a determined-looking woman with a red face and a coronet. In front of the tomb kneel their three sons and four daughters. The long inscription has in it a touch of defiance, proclaiming that Edmund Nevill, descended from kings and princes, was truly the 7th Earl of Westmorland. Actually his ancestor was Ralph Nevill, whose loyalty to Henry the Fourth has been vividly made use of by Shakespeare, but the 6th Earl was attainted for his attempt to release Mary Queen of Scots, and not even James the First would restore his title, so that the claim here is a bogus one.

In the churchyard is a stone set up in the days of the Commonwealth, but the most famous man buried here lies in an unmarked grave. He is Dr William Stukeley, the famous antiquary.

In the days when East Ham was a humble village William Stukeley paid a visit to his friend the vicar, Stukeley being then an old man who knew that his great labours were soon to end. As they wandered about the churchyard, gazing over the Thames marshes toward Shooter’s Hill, the old man turned to his friend and said: “When I die may I have a grave under this green turf, and will you see that no stone or other memorial is raised above me?” Stukeley was the leading antiquarian of his day, and realised only too well how vain are pompous sepulchres. Born in 1687 at Holbeach in Lincolnshire, he went from the grammar school there to Cambridge, became a doctor, and practised; but his heart was in the ancient story of our land, and he helped to found the Society of Antiquaries, becoming its secretary.

Many and long were the journeys he made with his friends, and curious were his notes. He wrote 20 books which, with all the errors that will creep into books, have helped our antiquarians ever since. His friends called him the Arch Druid, for Stonehenge had cast its spell about him, and he had devoted months to exploring it. His theories are wrong, but even now people tell us, as he did, that the Druids sacrificed at this great temple. It is his error that persists. Stonehenge and Avebury are both far older than the Druids, if Druids ever did exist. But these errors are nothing, for they can be corrected. What is remembered of Stukeley is his unweary zeal and his intense love of the Past. In 1765 they brought him here by the Essex highway and over Bow Bridge, and laid him to rest in East Ham churchyard, levelling the grass so that none can point to the spot, and he lies unknown as he wished to lie.

Flickr.

Barking

Two churches and one ruin, or rather remains; I liked Barking.

St Patrick feels like a guilty secret. Built in 1940 - where did they find the labour force? - this looks like the misbegotten love child of a bomb shelter and a water tower, is as ugly as that sounds and I loved it. Unsurprisingly LNK I think that's probably for the best as an internal view would almost certainly disappoint.

I feel oddly guilty about being somewhat indifferent to Barking Abbey, I'm sure it should have stirred me more. Approached from the north all that remains are rather uninteresting foundations but as you wander SE to St Margaret you find the gatehouse, or curfew tower, which is more interesting than the remains.

Beside the tower is St Margaret, open, which is not overly exciting but does hold quite a lot of interest inside particularly in its monuments.

Barking in the Middle Ages was famous for its ABBEY. This was founded c. 666 by St Erkenwald for Benedictine nuns and remained powerful to the date of the Dissolution. The church was pulled down in 1541. The site was excavated in 1910 and much of the medieval evidence can now clearly be read inscribed in stone lines in the grass. The buildings lay just N of the parish church. The abbey church faced the parish churchyard. It was of C12 date, just under 300 ft long and had a chancel with apse, chancel aisles with smaller apses, crossing tower, transepts with one  chapel each, nave of ten bays with aisles, and two W towers projecting slightly beyond the aisles. In the early C13 a Saint’s Chapel and Lady Chapel were added at the E end. To the N of the nave lay the cloister with the monastic buildings arranged in the usual way: Chapter House off the E walk, Dormitory off the W walk and projecting N beyond the Cloister; Rere-Dorter, that is lavatories beyond to the W and separated by a passage, Refectory along the N walk. N of the chancel beyond the Chapter House was the Infirmary with its separate chapel. Of all the monastic buildings only one remains upright: the E Gate or FIRE BELL GATE, a gate-tower with upper chapel, containing a badly worn, but originally excellent mid C12 (?) ROOD with three figures. The figures are in relief and the whole is built up of oblong blocks like the more famous contemporary reliefs at Chichester.

ST MARGARET. A church of proper town-size, not small as the nearby churches of East Ham and Dagenham. Nave and aisles, outer N aisle, chancel and chancel chapels, W tower. The chancel is of the early C13 - see its lancet windows (E window early C16). The octagonal piers of the N arcade of the same period. At that time the church must have had crossing and transepts, see the much wider opening of the present E bay of the arcades. Earlier still than the C13 appears the E chapel of the outer N aisle and especially the arcade of two bays to the N chancel chapel. This has circular pier and semi-circular responds, all with scalloped capitals. The ashlar masony also is Norman. The Royal Commission suggest re-use after the Dissolution. In the C15 the W parts of the N arcade were reconstructed, then the W parts of the S arcade built, the W tower (with taller stair turret) added and then the E parts of the arcades renewed (arches with two hollow chamfers). The tower is of Reigate ashlar, while the rest of the church is of rag. C15 also the chancel chapels. The date of the outer N aisle seems to be early C16. The nave roof is original, that of the chancel has a prettily stuccoed vault of 1772. All this makes a confusing picture, to the mind as much as the eye. - FONT. Bowl on baluster stem, with ornate scrolly ornament, just going gristly, i.e. c. 1635. - PULPIT. C18, with staircase railing of finely twisted balusters. - ORGAN CASE. C18, by Byfield. - SCULPTURES. Fragment C. 12 in. high, of Saxon cross shaft with close thin interlace ornament. Perhaps C10. — MONUMENTS. Brasses of Priest c. 1480, of Thomas Broke d. 1493 and wife, and of John Tedcastell and wife d. 1596 ; in chancel. - Brass of Richard Malet d. 1485, demi-figure of Priest, in N aisle. - Incised slab to Martin, first Vicar of Barking, d. 1328, large demi-figure, an important work of its type. - Sir Charles Montague d. 1625. A beautiful and unusual design with small seated figure in tent, musketeers l. and r. outside the tent, and many more tents in the distance. Sir Charles seems to muse on the next day’s destinies, and there is a great deal of suspense in the eve-of-battle atmosphere. - Francis Fuller d. 1636, with frontal bust in oval niche. - John Bennett d. 1706, a spectacular monument with a frontal demi-figure in elegant attitude between two columns carrying an open segmental pediment. To the l. and r. ships in relief. - Sir Orlando Humfreys d. 1737, standing wall monument with detached Corinthian columns carrying a far projecting broken segmental pediment. Between them the bust of Sir Orlando; outside the columns cherubs. Original iron railings. - John Bamber d. 1753, bust against obelisk attributed by Mrs Esdaile to Roubiliac. Original iron railings. - Sir Crisp Gascoyne d. 1761, Lord Mayor of London, elegant with weeping putto against a grey obelisk.

ST PATRICK, Blake Avenue. 1940 by A. E. Wiseman. An odd attempt at modern church architecture, with a circular E tower housing the apse and ending in bell-openings of somewhat streamlined design.

BARKING. It stands for the tranquil Age of Saxon England and for our troubled Age of Power, for it has the great ruins of the Old Abbey and the biggest Power House in the land. Thrilling it. must have been to see it in its days of fame when the Conqueror would come to seek the hospitality of the Saxon abbess while he built his town house, the Tower of London. Here the Saxon earls would come to swear him fealty. Every Toc H man must know that his church, All Hallows-by-the-Tower, is actually All Hallows, Barking, for it belonged to the abbey here at which the Conqueror stayed and of which we may see the ruins to this day.

It is a spacious place to walk in, and two 15th century towers look down on us as we wander in the footsteps of those who knew the abbey in its days of splendour - the gateway tower and the tower of St Margaret’s Church. We walk within the space of these great walls, in and out of the passages and corridors, for the site is beautifully kept and we can trace the foundations of the vanished structure, which was first Saxon, then Norman, and refashioned in medieval times. Stones have been let into the green turf to show us how the abbey stood, but much of the ancient walls remain a few feet high. A part of the nun’s church wall runs by the churchyard still. In this vanished church, 340 feet long, two queens have worshipped (the queens of Henry the First and of King Stephen).

The medieval gateway into this field of peace is a two-storeyed structure called the Curfew or Fire Bell Tower. It has a round arch built after the Normans, and above the archway is a chapel with a sculpture of the Crucifixion, showing the Madonna and St John at the foot of the Cross, John’s head leaning in sorrow towards the Master. It is the work of a 12th century artist, probably a Norman. Here also is preserved a ring which is believed to have been worn by an abbess of Barking Abbey.

The great church which stands by the ruined abbey has grown from age to age. Its oldest stone was part of a Saxon cross, carved with interlacing scrolls; it is preserved as perhaps the one link we have here with the settlement founded by St Erkenwald, the first bishop to preach in St Paul’s. There is also here a fragment of a black marble gravestone which came from the abbey with the name of a Norman bishop on it, Maurice. The chancel is the work of our first English builders but has in it a richly carved pillar piscina of the Normans, and in one of its chapels is a round Norman pier with scalloped capitals carved by one of the abbey’s Norman craftsmen.

The arcades in the nave are 13th and 15th century, the font is 16th, and has a 17th century cover painted with flowers, birds, and butterflies. One of the tower arch piers has a most beautiful recess with medieval tracery and ornamental vaulting; it is a gem, and has a tiny niche in it for some mysterious purpose. The roofs come from the same medieval period, and on some of the beams above the nave are ancient paintings; we noticed a woman riding a panther.

One precious possession the church has recovered from the ruins of the abbey, the gravestone of the first vicar here. He died in 1328, and his memorial is one of those engraved stones which were the forerunners of brasses. It shows him deeply cut in the stone with his curly hair, his embroidered collar and cuffs, and his name and office in bold letters.

Of the four brasses here three are 15th century and one 16th; two show priests in their robes, one shows Thomas Broke and his wife with a son and daughter, and a hundred years later is John Tedcastell with his wife, four sons, and five babes in swaddling clothes.

On the chancel wall sits in armour, in a tent guarded by sentries, with a page holding a horse close by, Sir Charles Montagu, whose brother sentenced Sir Walter Raleigh. Among a group of 17th and 18th century busts is Francis Fuller of 1636 with three bright shields, John Bennett in front of the prow and stern of a warship, Orlando Humfreys with four cherubs, John Bamber of 1753, and Sir Crisp Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of 1753. One of the windows has a quay scene in bright colours, and another shows St Erkenwald holding a model of the abbey.

One of the attractive modern possessions of this old place is an array of carved and painted figures on the top of the south chapel screen, the Fishermen’s Memorial. It is an interesting company with St Nicholas and the three children he saved from death, James and John with their fishermen’s nets, Ethelburga (first abbess here), and two famous historic figures whose names must live as long as history. One is Elizabeth Fry, who is here because she lived close by and lies in the little Quaker burial ground not far away; the other is the immortal Captain Cook.

It was a few days before Christmas in 1762 that Elizabeth Batts stood in front of the altar of this church to be married to James Cook, who was then paying a flying visit home from his charting of American waters. They had six children, of whom three died as babies, the other three boys growing up to love the sea. Elizabeth said goodbye to her husband in 1776 and four years later news came to her of his death, which had happened 20 months before. She was to survive him for 56 years, years of great sorrow for her, for she outlived all her children and was alone in the world for 40 years. There have been few lonelier lives than that of the bride who stood in this place to marry a sailor who found a continent.

One or two odd things of great interest Barking has in its church. There is a Bible of Armada year on an 18th century table, a helmet hanging on the wall, a stone from the old abbey, scooped out and called the Nun’s Bath, and an oyster shell with the date 1510 scratched on it, thought to be the date of one of the extensions of the church.

Barking is fortunate in having one of its finest old houses in the care of the National Trust, which has placed it at the disposal of the town for its museum. It is the 16th century Eastbury House, one of the architectural masterpieces of its day, a handsome structure with its gables and chimneys and turrets, and original garden walls with the old niches for beehives. There is a great painted chamber with wall-paintings of Elizabethan ships, one in full sail and one at anchor, and another old painting of an avenue of trees standing out from an elaborate painted background of panels and corinthian columns. The room above this gallery, which is 70 feet long, has a magnificent queenpost roof which is in a perfect state of preservation.

The museum so nobly housed has a fascinating collection. There is a Roman coffin of stone which is 17 centuries old, and a series of charming watercolours of old houses and views reveal the Barking of last century. Mr Frank Brangwyn has given prints of his Stations of the Cross, and the National Art Collections Fund has enriched the museum with a panel of 16th century Flemish glass. An English woodcarving of the 17th century shows the Sacrifice of Isaac, and (constant delight of Barking’s children) there is a Georgian Doll’s House which has been completely refurnished in the style of 1865. The ingenuity of a young artist who was too poor to pay for living models is shown in a group of coloured figures which he moulded and arranged for his painting After Waterloo. He was Charles Gogin, who died in 1931. Here, too, is one of the finest collections of armour in this country. Contrasted with examples of exquisite workmanship from the 15th century, we have a model of an Elizabethan soldier trailing his pike. There is an excellent series showing the development of Gothic armour, and also of the development of spurs. Among the spurs is an English spur from Bosworth Field; its wearer evidently caught his heel in the bole of a tree and the spur brought him down. Another famous battlefield has yielded something to this amazing collection - Agincourt, from which has come a sword made at Dreux, with gold ornament and a coat-of-arms on its hilt.

The museum has been the scene of some valuable loan exhibitions, the most attractive having been one illustrating Elizabethan England and another the Art of the Theatre. Eastbury House has indeed come again into its own, a treasure house of great dignity, worthy of the
fine town of Barking.

Such is Barking old, with all its wonder of the past; what of Barking new, with all its wonder of the present? It has come to stand for great things in the life of the greatest city in the world, for it has one of our greatest power houses for electricity, and on the other side of Barking Creek is the main outfall of North London’s drainage, 28 acres of brick-walled reservoirs and tanks, looking like some great work of the Roman Empire, built by the engineer who laid out the Thames Embankment. In these great tanks takes place the chemical purification of all this drainage, the water being pumped into the Thames and the rest shipped on vessels which are taken out to sea, where it is thrown overboard. The concrete supporting the floor of the reservoir is 20 feet thick and the reservoir can contain over forty million gallons at one time.

The Barking Power House, standing among the wastes of the river estuary, gaunt emblem of the energy driving the wheels of the 20th century, has the two biggest transformers in the world and the two biggest turbo-generators in England. These works are one of the causes of the great growth of Barking’s population, which has risen from 14,000 a hundred years ago to about 80,000. Side by side on the Longbridge Road are two open spaces the town has provided for all these people, a 76-acre park and a swimming pool 165 feet long, holding over half-a-million gallons of water.

The Saint of the Miserables

THE name of Elizabeth Fry (who lived here and lies here) endures for ever with Florence Nightingale’s; she is the saint of the prisons.

Her clarion call for mercy and justice to the miserable people in the prisons of -her day rang through England and through Europe. Prisons were then sinks of suffering and iniquity, in which plague came as a great deliverance from anguish. Men and women, innocent and guilty, were herded like cattle in filthy dens; even girls and little children perished of disease in these noisome places.

Into this world of misery and shame Elizabeth Fry came as an angel from Heaven. She was an eldest child in the old Quaker family of John Gurney, the banker of Norwich, and she had been moved as a girl by the preaching of the Gospel. She married Joseph Fry when she was only twenty, and the fact that he did not share her great-heartedness made her all the more determined to give herself to some great cause.

She began preaching, and it is recorded that her beautiful voice melted the hardest men. Even as a child she had visited a prison with her father, and when she was 33 she happened to hear of the state of things at Newgate, where about 300 women and children were crowded into two wards and two cells. They had nothing to do. They had neither nightclothes nor bedclothes. They ate and slept, cooked and washed, in the same foul space. Even the Governor of Newgate was afraid to trust himself alone in this place, but Elizabeth Fry went into it, and her presence had a miraculous effect on these unhappy people.

She roused Parliament and persuaded it to appoint a committee to go into all this. She found work for prisoners set free. She exposed the exploiters and oppressors of these prisoners, and she went into prisons all over the land improving their conditions. She made it possible for public men to think of reforms such as had never occurred to Parliament or to public men; it was her trumpet that woke up the nation to one of the greatest horrors existing within it. Sydney Smith, who laughed too much, declared that the sight of Elizabeth Fry among these people moved him to tears - they clung to the hem of her garment, he said, and worshipped her as the only being who had ever loved, taught, or noticed them, or spoken to them of God.

She carried her work to the Continent, and its influence spread through Europe. She met rulers and princes; it was nothing to her whether  she was entertaining the King of Prussia or having tea with  a cobbler. She gave her life to miserable people anywhere, and it made no difference to her when her husband became bankrupt and found himself in poverty. She carried on, and she went about doing good until she died at 65 and was laid in this little burial ground of the Friends.

Flickr.

Collier Row

Again neither Pevsner no Mee cover Collier Row and I have to ask myself - what was I thinking when I included The Church of the Ascension on my list of churches to visit?; it's utterly without merit.

On my way home though I passed the 1930s The Good Shepherd which I liked.

Chadwell Heath

Neither Pevsner nor Mee cover St Chad, which was locked no keyholder, and I rather liked this 1877 Frederick Chancellor designed building although I'd be surprised if the interior holds any interest.

Romford

There are four churches I'm interested in in Romford - St Alban Protomartyr, two St Edward the Confessors and St Andrew; I only know that there are two Edward the Confessors because when attempting to visit the CoE church I inadvertently used the RC one's postcode and thus need to return to cover the church I meant to in the first place.

A dire Victorian built church, the interest at St Alban lies within - so naturally it's locked no keyholder. I now know that you can pre-organise a visit and having read this article I may invest time on an excursion.

St Edward the Confessor is one of those rare beasts, in my experience, a locked no keyholder RC church. I'm normally pretty confident that I'll find RC churches open but not here. Taking Stock's entry can be found here.

St Andrew, locked no keyholder, and that's probably enough said.

I returned to Romford and found the CoE Edward the Confessor open - a constant stream of people came and went whilst I was there, lighting candles, praying or just dropping in for a chat with the ladies who run the shop at the west end of the church - this should be a shining example to all town churches, an open church attracts  visitors and reduces the risk of vandalism or theft.

One of the ladies was interested in why I was visiting and we had a lengthy chat about the church and the district. One of her gems was the tale of St Edward being asked for alms from a beggar on his way to his palace. Finding himself cashless he gave the man one of his rings and that's how Have a ring atte Bower acquired its name - neither of us quite believe the tale but we agreed that it had a ring to it (sorry)!

Anyway this is an interesting, though new build interior, (the exterior is dull) with good modern glass amongst run of the mill Victorian windows and I liked the monuments.

ST EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, Market Place. 1849-50 by John Johnson. Big, with tall spire on the S side facing the Market. Fussy enough to impress. - PLATE. Cup and Paten on foot, probably 1623; two Flagons 1653; Salver 1654; large Cup 1661. - MONUMENTS. Sir Anthony Cooke d. 1576, and family. Broad triptych composition with Corinthian columns. Pediment over the centre. Kneelers in all three parts. - Less good Sir George Hervey d. 1605, and wife. Also Corinthian columns and also kneelers. - Ann Carew d. 1605, semi-reclining effigy, head propped up on elbow.

St Alban

Edward the Confessor RC

St Andrew

ROMFORD. It has trebled its population since our century began and has wiped out some ancient local history which now seems rather quaint, but which nevertheless reaches back to Saxon and even Roman times.

For many centuries its countryside had a government of its own, under the name of Havering-atte-Bower, an independent patch in the midst of Essex, with a royal palace belonging to a succession of English queens. Romford had the chief group of population in this little royal Liberty, where Queens went for retirement, or for hunting in the great Essex forest. When the forest vanished before the advance of progressive agriculture, the Liberty became a typical rural marketing centre, as Romford still is, though now it is also within the residential fringe of London. This century it has been given Raphael Park, with handsome iron gates.

If we would seek visible reminders of Romford’s history we must come to the 19th century church of Edward the Confessor, whose 162-foot spire is a landmark all around. It stands boldly in the market place, close to the meeting of the town’s four chief roads. The new church has a great monument from the old one showing Sir Anthony Cooke, whose family was dominant in Romford for nearly 200 years. Sir Anthony kneels in Tudor armour facing his wife in a ruff and cloak. Behind him kneel his two sons, and behind his wife the four daughters who are believed to have composed his long Latin epitaph and to have been the cleverest women of their day. They certainly belonged to a remarkable family.

Sir Anthony was the great-grandson of Sir Thomas, a wealthy Lord Mayor of London who built himself a great house in Gidea Park, near Romford, but made the mistake of backing the losing side in the Wars of the Roses and barely escaped the scaffold. Still, he died rich and in Tudor days his descendants flourished, so much so that Sir Anthony rebuilt Gidea Hall, and as Steward of the Liberty of Havering-atte-Bower entertained Queen Elizabeth there.

Sir Anthony Cooke was a student, in love with country life, and a believer in education as the most broadening influence. He acted as tutor to his four sons and five daughters, and their accomplishments were so much admired that he was chosen tutor to the young King Edward the Sixth, who knighted him at his coronation.

The four daughters on the monument all married well. Mildred married the great Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s trusted adviser; Ann became the mother of Francis Bacon; Elizabeth’s husband was Lord Russell of the famous Bedford family; Katherine married Sir Henry Killigrew, one of the busiest of Elizabeth’s ambassadors. Gidea Hall has gone and the family is extinct, but the alabaster group passed on from the old church to the new church preserves an enduring household.

Another favourite of Queen Elizabeth is on his monument in the church porch. He is Sir George Hervey, with his wife, five sons, and six daughters. He was the Lieutenant of the Tower. On the opposite wall is Anne Carew’s monument showing her leaning on her elbow and looking far from attractive.

By the church is an interesting 15th century building originally a home for a chantry priest. Then it became the Cock and Bell inn, now it is once more a Church House. Timbered and plastered, it has old beams and 17th century panelling. When we called the cock could still be, seen, on the glass of the door, seated on the bell.

Another link with Romford’s past is a picturesque group of 19th century almshouses round a garden in North Street, close to the River Rom winding its way southward through the town to become the Beam River and finally reach the Thames. Their history goes back to 1482 when Roger Reede’s will bequeathed his newly-built house of Hoocrofts “to be a dwelling place for five poor men, not blasphemers of the name of almighty God, nor common beggars, but such as have been of good governance and fallen into poverty; the saddest and wisest to be the ruler.”

In the manor house of Romford (now vanished) was born in 1592 a poet who for a time was perhaps the most popular English poet in a serious vein. No one is now captivated by reading Francis Quarles, and few have even a nodding acquaintance with him, but he was once a prevailing fashion. Horace Walpole complained that “Milton was forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles.” The poet’s family had associations with the Stuart court, and Francis was an ardent pamphleteer defender of Charles; at the same time he was a Puritan in spirit. His style has annoying contradictory qualities. He followed the fashion of elaborate “conceits,” yet no one could write more smoothly and plainly, as we see in this, one of his few famous verses:

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on,
Judge not the play before the play is done.
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene: the last act crowns the play.

He had wit and vivacity, but varied it with appalling dolefulness. His obvious piety impressed the serious, but he entangled himself in the literary tricks of his day, and has now been almost wholly excluded even from the most copious anthologies.

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Hornchurch

122 CWGC headstones pretty much stop you in your tracks and then to find that St Andrew is open should be a show stopper and, up to a point, it is but...

An open church this far south in Essex is a rarity and for that it is fully appreciated but over the years it's been reordered, refurbished, thoroughly rebrushed and has lost it's soul in the process. Bits remain - the bull head on the chancel (a feature that is exceptional and possibly unique), a couple of good monuments and the modern pulpit and the windows are worthy of note - I liked it but I think more because it was open than for itself.

ST ANDREW. A large, townish church, although Hornchurch was a village, until London got hold of it and made it into a dormitory with more than 100,000 inhabitants. The church has a C13 chancel and a C13 arcade between nave and aisles (circular piers with moulded capitals; double-chamfered arches). Perp N and S aisles, clerestory, N and S chancel-chapels, N porch and W tower. The church is light, thanks to three-light aisle and clerestory windows (the E window is new). The chancel chapels have octagonal piers and double-hollow-chamfered arches. The W tower is big and prominent, with diagonal buttresses, higher SW stair-turret and recessed spire. - STAINED GLASS. Tall late C13 arches, five-cusped on slim shafts. A squint in the back wall of the westernmost seat. - DOORS. N and W doorways, C15 or early C16. - STAINED GLASS. Bits (e.g. Crucifixus, headless) in the E window of the N chapel; C15. - PLATE. Cup and Paten of 1563; Paten of c. 1690, Flagon of 1690; Almsdish of 1716; Paten of 1719; Cup and Paten of 1733, all good pieces. - MONUMENTS. Several Brasses in chancel and N chapel *, e.g. five boys of c. 1500. - Tomb-chest with quatrefoil decoration, to William Ayloffe d. 1517. - Francis Rame d. 1617, monument with kneeling figures; alabaster. - Richard Blakstone d. 1638, with two kneelers and two standing angels pulling away a curtain; alabaster. - Richard Spencer d. 1784, by Flaxman. Two standing angels and medallion with double portrait. - Outside the churchyard gate the WAR MEMORIAL by Sir Charles Nicholson, 1921.

* These are now covered by a fitted carpet.

HORNCHURCH. William of Wykeham sitting in his robes looks down from a turret in its splendid tower. He found here a 13th century church and is believed to have designed this tower for it himself; he sits on it with his arms extended in blessing. Above him a copper-covered spire rises 120 feet, sheltering a peal of eight musical bells.

The village has lost the brass with the portrait of a famous man who came here long before William of Wykeham - Sir Boniface de Hart, a canon of Aosta, lying in this English soil so far from his home. He is here because our powerful King Henry the Second, courting the favour of Frederic Barbarossa, the greatest of the Holy Roman Emperors, sent envoys to speak with him, and they passed over the Great St Bernard Pass. There they were cared for by the monks of the Hospice, and in return for the kindness of the monks Henry founded the only religious house in England attached to this famous Hospice of Savoy. The church of the hospice was served by foreign priests and their London house gave its name to the little Savoy Hill that runs down from the Strand to the Thames. In course of time Sir Boniface came from Aosta at the foot of the pass to reign as prior at Hornchurch by the Thames, now on the borders of Greater London, and here he died and was buried in 1330.

The church stands on the highest ground between the River Rom and the Ingrebourne; it has the stone head of a bull with copper-sheathed horns gazing out from its gable. There is still here a 13th century coffin lid with a cross for one of the first men buried here.

Coming through a porch as old as the tower, we swing open a door that is older still; William of Wykeham himself may have opened it. It brings us into a church with fine carving in stone, flowers in a panel above a graceful pier, and roses carved 500 years ago on the piscina. The chapel is lighted by glass 500 years old with a portrait of Edward the Confessor, the head of Our Lord in glory, and a head of Mary which has been wrongly set on the figure by a restorer.

Under the arch dividing this chapel from the chancel is a tomb of great beauty in which William Ayloffe has lain 400 years, and high on the chancel wall is a group by Flaxman, in which two women are mourning for Richard Spencer and his wife, whose faces are delicately carved. Kneeling under marble curtains are Richard Bealestone and his wife, buried here on the eve of the Civil War. Lying here also is  a man linked by his scholarship with one of our kings, Humphrey Pye, letter-writer for King James; he is with his wife, carved in alabaster on the wall. In the tower is a quaint group of people in black, the 16th century family of Francis Rame with his wife and their ten children. There are portraits in brass of the two wives of William Drywood in quaint Elizabethan hats, and a portrait of their kinsman Thomas Drywood with his wife. Two brass tablets nearer our time awaken deep memories, for one is to Joseph Fry, whose mother was the angel of our prisons, and the other is to 769 members of the Sportsman’s Battalion who offered their lives for their country in the war, were trained as soldiers at Hornchurch, and left this place to see England no more.

Here, as we have seen, lies a letter-writer for King James; but here lies one of the great pioneers of letters, a man who started the distribution of letters for King James’s son on a scale King James never dreamed of. He was Thomas Witherings, who started the Post Office. We read of him on a black tablet with a tiny carving of a skeleton, which tells us that he organised the delivery of letters for Charles Stuart and that he died on his way to this church one Sunday in 1651.

In 1633 he was granted a patent as postmaster for foreign letters. There were already regulations for the carriage of Government letters, and in the reign of King James Lord Stanhope was Master of the Posts and Messengers, receiving 100 marks a year and all “avails and profits” in addition. In postal affairs generally, however, there was hopeless confusion, because merchants were allowed to use messengers of their own. Witherings soon proved himself a far-sighted organiser. He speeded up the mail between London and the  Continent so that he was able to point out to the king that his subjects could receive a quicker and surer reply to a letter from Madrid than ordinarily from Scotland.

Thomas Witherings accordingly drew up a new scheme which was embodied in a Proclamation, and after that a letter to Edinburgh took three days instead of nearly a month. Witherings made it a rule that the speed of the letter post should be seven miles an hour in summer and five in winter, and he also introduced registration and postmarks; in his own words:

Every postmaster is to keep a faire paper book to enter the packets in, and shall write upon the labell fastened to every or any of the packets the time of receit thereoff.

Even with royal support it was impossible to carry out great reforms without hostility, and in 1640 this energetic organiser was accused of misdemeanours and his office given to a London merchant. A long wrangle ensued in Parliament and the courts, during which the mails were often seized, and the postal revenue fell to £5000 in 1643. Witherings was worried almost to death, and he actually died on his way to a service at Hornchurch in 1651. In the church we may still read what his friends thought of him, the

Chief Postmaster of Greate Britaine and foreign parts, second to none for unfathomed policy, unparalleled, sagacious, and divining genius; witness his great correspondence in all parts of the Christian World.

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Essex rivers

The Mighty Forest Buried in the Marshes

THE rivers of Essex are today mere streams compared with the rivers of 500 centuries ago; as they approach their wide estuaries they flow through marshland formed from soil brought down by their mighty forerunners. Along both banks of the Thames the marshes, little higher than the level of the sea, stretch far and wide, except fora few hundred yards at Purfleet and Grays, where the chalk breaks through their monotony.

The spring tides would often submerge them, and for centuries man has fought a battle with the waters blown upstream from the North Sea. The cost of embankments almost ruined the rich nuns of Barking, and it was not until the Dutch engineers came along in the 17th century that the Essex marshes could be profitably used by the farmer.

Since that time the marshes nearer London have become the sites of docks and industries, and another century or two will see London’s great Port actually within sight of the open sea.

Romantic as is this victory of man over Nature, there is a great romance of Nature herself beneath the river and the ancient marshlands through which it winds its way to sea. Here beneath the waters, with the ships sailing above them to the ends of the earth, are the fallen giants of our ancient forests. Here and there on our coasts we come upon a fossil forest, as at Lulworth, with trees turned to stone, but beneath the marshes of the Thames are submerged forests with trees that are still wood, as when, perhaps fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, men dressed in skins would hide among them hunting hyenas and bears.

From one of these lost forests has come down to us a dramatic piece of news. We know that one day a wild pig, seeking food in a forest where Carmarthen Bay is now, was killed by a great tree falling. The pig lay dead beneath the trunk for ages, buried deep in leaves and moss each year until the mould piled up through centuries of time, while empires rose and fell, and the forest sank slowly in the sea. One day they found in the marsh, among the trees embedded in the peat, the tree which fell and killed the pig at Lydstep Haven near Tenby.

It is a forest such as this that lies today beneath the marshes of the Thames, both in Essex and in Kent. If we sail down to Margate from London Bridge we sail where birds once nested in the tops of trees. The trees are gone, and our most ancient river has piled mud and sand high above the verdant glades, so that all we see are mud flats and a waste of waters.

This estuary of the Thames, with the country round it, was once eighty feet higher than it is. Southend and Sheerness were then far from the sea, up-river places, and where their busy streets are now were wooded hillsides, over which the stag and the wild boar roamed and men sent flint-headed arrows after them. Then the Thames wended its way through green vegetation where now is sea as far as the eye can reach. After passing the Nore, the comparatively narrow channel of the ancient river took a north-easterly course through either Black Deep or Barrow Deep, submarine depressions believed to be the sunken watercourse of the Thames, and entered the North Sea several miles east of Clacton. The Medway was then a tributary of the Thames, rather like the Darent now, while a range of hills extended north-east from Sheppey and far out to sea.

Beneath the marshy tracts bordering the great river from London to the sea these trees can be recovered by anyone prepared to dig a dozen feet. For over 250 years this vast submerged surface of ancient Britain, with its fossil treasures, has been opened up at one place and another. It was so in the days of Pepys in 1665, when he wrote in his diary:

At Blackwall, in digging the late docke, they did, twelve feet underground, find perfect trees covered with earth, nut trees with branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts Johnson showed us; their shells black with age, and their kernell upon opening decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree (upon which the very ivy was taken up whole about it) which upon cutting, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is.

From Woolwich to Crossness Point, under the entire area of Plumstead and Erith Marshes, are oak and alder trees, branches and roots in great quantities. Furniture has been made out of the oak. On each side of the Thames beyond Purfleet and the Darent the stumps of the trees may often be seen. Beneath the marshes of Rainham and Dagenham, are vast numbers of trees with roots, boughs, and bark covered with mould and clay to a depth of from seven to twelve feet; the latest older than the Romans, the lowest as old as the Stone Age. From Greenwich to Greenhithe on the Kent side of the river an old forest bed of yew, oak, and pine lies twenty feet below, and beneath this bed two of our ancient ancestors have been found, one a hundred thousand years old and one thousands of centuries older.