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St Paul, Bentley

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This elegant 19th Century church sits in an attractive hamlet with older houses for company. It was built in the 1870s as a chapel of ease to the church of St Peter, South Weald. As James Bettley explains in his revision of the Buildings of England volume for Essex, South Weald is one of Essex's largest parishes, but until the late 19th Century it was even bigger, including all of the town of Brentwood. Today the tables are turned, and both Bentley and South Weald are contained within the administrative boundaries of Brentwood, but to stand at Bentley you would not know that a town of sixty thousand people was only just over the rise, for this feels an entirely rural spot. The church was paid for by Charles Almeric Belli, the wealthy rector of South Weald, and the architect was the idiosyncratic EC Lee. The church cost eight thousand pounds, roughly one and a half million in today's money. Lee is best known today for Bentley's near-contemporary church in Brentwood, the remarkably prescient St Thomas of Canterbury, the town's largest church and with a flavour of churches of twenty or thirty years later. At Bentley he was not so serious, and perhaps this contributes to it being at once charming and simple. As with the Brentwood church the style is Early English. The solid tower sits on the north side of the chancel, surmounted by an elegant broach spire that lifts about as high again as the nave. A foundation stone records the church's dedication on the 9th day of November 1878. You reach the church from the north along a long avenue lined by yew trees, and enter the interior which is still almost entirely Lee's church, the plain furnishings to his design and Thomas Earp's stone pulpit, screen and reredos all of a piece. The seven steps up to the altar from the nave suggest a High Church enthusiasm at the time. Apart from Clayton & Bell's east and west windows which were installed for the new church, all of the glass is 20th Century, and most of it is pretty good. Kempe & Co produced the first glass on the north side of the nave with two windows of the 1920s. GER Smith came along after the Second World War with another north side window and the earliest of the glass in the smaller south aisle windows. These were then filled successively in the 1980s with glass by Maille Studios of Canterbury, with the last glass, and perhaps the most memorable, being Goddard & Gibbs' delightful and wholly secular glass depicting local nature in memory of the Amos and Pepperell families, installed on the north side of the nave in 1992. A pleasant space then, and the decades since Lee's vision came to fruition have generally been both kind and in keeping with it. However, in 2016 the church was placed on Historic England's 'Heritage At Risk' register, citing Leaking iron gutters on stone string courses starting to cause failure in stone. Evidence of active leakage. Much Bath stone in evidence, some of which appears to be of poor quality and particularly susceptible to decay due to excess moisture. The report was able to note that a programme of repairs had been put in hand. Simon Knott, January 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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