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This is a large and impressive
church that might have felt more at home in Norfolk
or Suffolk were it not for the striking and memorable
red brick clerestory raised in the early 16th Century
and the accompanying battlemented porch, the material
so familiar from Essex buildings of this time.
Pevsner notes that the nave and chancel are
essentially those of a preceding Norman church, but
later arcades and aisles with their window tracery
give it a feel , from the exterior at least, as being
almost entirely of the late medieval period. Even on a bright day the great space you
step into can seem a little gloomy with its
middle-brow floors and furnishings, a fairly urban
affair of the 1860s, and this is perhaps because the
restoration here was carried out at the hands of
Frederic Chancellor, by no means always a happy
circumstance. Still, the bones of the building
survive, and looking east is to see the surprise of
two triple light windows above the off-centre chancel
arch. Best of all are the bosses in the low-canted
roof above the clerestory. Among them, a man in a
cowl lifts his cloak, a man sticks his tongue out and
a cherub rises from an urn. There is a creature with
a human head, a green man and what looks like a cat,
though it may be intended as a lion.
  
  
  
A restored parclose screen from
the start of the 15th Century sits at the east end of
the north aisle, and may suggest a date for the
completion of the church a century before the roof
was raised and the clerestory added. The only other
old survival in the nave is the font, a curiously
primitive affair considering its size, the bowl with
panels depicting the evangelistic symbols alternating
with angels holding shields, though it is quite
unlike the East Anglian series of fonts that feature
this sequence. Glass of 1868 in the north aisle
depicts a series of figures of saints by Heaton,
Butler & Bayne, including St Valentine, and I
cannot think of another representation of him in an
Essex church, or indeed in any of the churches of
Cambridgeshire, Norfolk or Suffolk either. The other
figures here are St Edmund, St George and St Dorothy.
The best glass in the church is
the 1931 east window by Martin Travers, an artist who
was always more than competent and here especially
so. The scenes of the Annunciation, the Nativity and
the Presentation in the Temple flow into each other,
and from a distance appear almost to form a single
scene.
    
  
There are a couple of pieces of
old glass, a Tudor royal arms and an M monogram that
would presumably have been associated with an image
of the Blessed Virgin, but such details are thin on
the ground in comparison with the sheer scale of the
anonymous, urban space they inhabit. Most striking of
all perhaps is quite how few memorials there are
here, in comparison with so many grand churches which
are home to the expensive monuments of successive
generations of their wealthy local families. Such
memorials are not always well done of course, and
those that they remember may appal us at this
distance, but such things do provide a counterpoint
beat to the passage of a church building over time,
telling us as much about the lives of the ordinary
people of the parish as they do of their masters.
Here, there are only a few scraps remaining of our
ancestors' imaginations to speak for them.
Simon
Knott, December 2021
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