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St Leonard at the Hythe, Colchester

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. Colchester is unusual, and perhaps unique in England, because for a town of 150,000+ people it has no large central church. There were nine small medieval parishes, each with its own small church, but none as big as Ipswich's St Mary le Tower, or Norwich's St Peter Mancroft, or Cambridge's St Mary the Great. They suffered two depredations that churches nowhere else in England had to suffer - most were ruined during the 1648 Seige of Colchester (being the only fortified buildings in town, the Royalists holed up in them and they were attacked by the Parliamentarians) and then the earthquake of 1884, after which two of them were demolished. One of the survivors was St Leonard. Set on the Hythe, the old Colchester port area, now a rundown area of 19th century streets and warehouses, but 'coming up' with apartments along the waterfront. This was the former parish church, but is now redundant and in the care of the CCT. St Leonard is the biggest and grandest church in Colchester, about a mile from the town centre. It would not be out of place in rural Suffolk, with aisles and a clerestory, and its tower surmounted with flushwork and pinnacles. The church is open Tuesdays and Saturdays, with a keyholder notice at other times, but both keyholders were out, which was my big disappointment of the day. The south door has repaired musket ball holes in it - the Seige of Colchester was broken here when the Royalists guarding the river crossing were overpowered by a regiment of Suffolk parliamentarians who took the church and laid open the way into the centre of the Borough. An extraordinary prospect, looking up Hythe Hill. Simon Knott, August 2013

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
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Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
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