THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE
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All Saints, East Horndon
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This elegant red brick church sits in a bleak location on a heathland hill directly above a major junction on the A127 London to Southend dual carriageway. You come to it by an unsigned track from the dual carriageway, and then a half mile path across scrub land. If it hadn't been for the 'church open' sign on the back road I think perhaps that I would not even have approached it. It looked forbidding, dangerous even. And yet as you approach closer it is a building of quite extraordinary beauty, benefitting from two dates, the body of the church in the early 16th Century and the tower a century later. The south porch and transept run together under one sloping roof, an unusual device (indeed, cruciform churches are unusual at all in this part of the world.) You step into an interior that is at once rustic in character and almost completely empty. Abandoned in 1965, this little church suffered what has been described as 'an unprecedented and violent serial attack of vandalism' in the late 1960s before being rescued by the Redundant Churches Fund, today the Churches Conservation Trust. No internal furnishings survive.
Ironically, considering the rocky journey the building has undergone these past few decades, the structure is remarkably unaltered. There was a restoration by GF Bodley at the start of the 20th Century, but of course this was late enough for preservation to be an important part of the restoration process. There was a careful repair job done in the 1970s under the experienced and watchful eye of Laurence King.
The C17 Tyrell memorial by Nollekens, which you may find listed in older guides, is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. But in any case the most memorable feature here is the 1420s slab memorial to Lady Tyrell, her effigy lying incised between her nine children. She wears a horned head dress. It is, as Pevsener noted, an object of great rarity and beauty.
Simon Knott, May 2020
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