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St Mary, Great Baddow, Chelmsford

I got the train to Chelmsford, arriving soon after 8am. I quite like Chelmsford, a thing it is easy to do when you accept it for what it is, a young and enthusiastic place where they are rather keen on quality modern buildings. It has a human scale that is a hangover from it being a small market town as recently as the early 20th Century. And did you know that it has more miles of cycle lane per head of population than any other town in Britain? And proper cycle lanes, too, through parkland rather than painted in beside busy roads. Unfortunately, the OS map doesn't show them, so I ended up battling with traffic on the ring road to reach the eastern suburbs and the church of St Mary, Great Baddow. Locked, no keyholder notice. Everybody moans that this one is locked without a keyholder, so I hadn't expected anything different, especially as it was still only about 8.30 in the morning. I suspect the architecture is the best thing here anyway. From a distance you see the spire, a replica of that on the cathedral a mile or so off, but coming closer the church is very different, a late medieval red brick rebuild of the clerestory looking like a grand country house with a flint tower attached. Incongruous but attractive. Although Great Baddow is a typical Essex suburb with estates and tower blocks, the church is in the old village centre with early 19th century agri-industrial buildings and a Tudor pub. They were putting on a psychic night, I noticed - the pub, not the church. Wishing it had been open (there's nothing worse than the first church of the day being locked) I headed on through suburbia to Sandon. Simon Knott, April 2013

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