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St Peter, South Weald

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Essex is generally a county of small churches, especially in the south, so it can be a surprise to come across such substantial buildings as this one, set impressively in its otherwise quiet little village. The overall impression is one of length, the chancel emerging beyond the low south aisle like a train overtaking another one, and this is accentuated by the sheer bulk of the west tower. The lower stages of the tower reveal its late medieval origins, but otherwise the church was entirely rebuilt by that maverick architect SS Teulon in the 1860s at the expense of Charles Almeric Belli, the wealthy rector of South Weald who also paid for the construction of the chapel of ease at Bentley a few years later. The fairytale castle top of the tower is Teulon's, the nave, aisle and chancel entirely his, although he reused a Norman doorway from the original church. Not surprisingly, you step into a space which is all of a piece, dark and shadowy and suggestive of Belli's High Church enthusiasm. The south aisle looks eastward to a pleasing ironwork screen to the design of George Gilbert Scott, but the lack of a clerestory reinforces the length of the nave and chancel beside it. As at Bentley, the stone carving was by Thomas Earp, although the sanctuary seems to have been reordered after Belli's death, the east window being his memorial and the sanctuary furnishings installed to the design of EC Lee who Belli had employed for his church at Bentley. The bulk of the glass is typically gloomy work by Kempe & Co installed between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it has to be said that this is not an interior which lifts the heart, although the atmospheric lighting in the sanctuary is effective. Perhaps my memory of the church is coloured by my experience here, for on a visit in 2013 I stepped into the sanctuary to photograph the Kempe glass and set off an alarm which was so ear-splitting that it must have been heard for miles around. We waited a while to make our apologies, but nobody came and so in the end we departed, leaving the great 19th Century space echoing with a surreal siren wailing across the shadows cast through Kempe's lifeless glass. Simon Knott, January 2022 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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