THURLEIGH † St Peter
6m/10km N. of Bedford
OS TL051584 GPS 52.2144N, 0.4626W
By a castle motte, St Peter’s has an early Norman central tower with S. doorway, and a crude Adam and Eve carved in the tympanum. Otherwise the church is mostly Perpendicular with some early glass, a nave floor brass of c. 1420 and a 1590 wall brass to Edmond Daye in the S. aisle.
TOTTERNHOE † St Giles
2m/3km W. of Dunstable
OS SP988208 GPS 51.8778N, 0.5656W
This church, built from the quarries in the village, has an unusually fine exterior. In the gable of the nave is flint flushwork in the Chiltern style. Begun in the 14th century and adorned in the 16th by a pinnacled skyline, it provides a most satisfactory silhouette. Inside, all is space and light with carved roofs and woodwork, brasses and a good E. window by John Piper.
TURVEY † All Saints
7m/11km W. of Bedford
OS SP940525 GPS 52.1632N, 0.6267W
The Ouse Valley village is Victorian-Jacobean in character; its pre-Conquest church with 14th- to 15th-century additions was sumptuously ‘improved’ by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the mid-19th century. Exuberant scrolled ironwork by the local man, Thomas of Leighton, decorates the S. door, and there is a fine collection of 15th- and 16th-century brasses and monuments, largely to the Mordaunt family.
WILLINGTON † St Lawrence
4m/6km E. of Bedford
OS TL106498 GPS 52.1360N, 0.3847W
A grand early 16th-century church, St Lawrence was paid for by Sir John Gostwick, d. 1545, who was in the service of Henry VIII; his tomb is beside the altar. A memorable N. chapel contains helmets and monuments. The 1876–7 restoration was by Henry Clutton.
WOBURN † St Mary
5m/8km N. of Leighton Buzzard
OS SP948332 GPS 51.9896N, 0.6199W
St Mary’s was erected in 1865–8 by William, eighth Duke of Bedford, to the designs of Henry Clutton, Bath stone being used throughout. It is an absolutely magnificent building; the interior is vaulted in stone and the echoes of the Ile de France are strong. The tall reredos by Caroe, choir-stalls and pulpit are later additions.
WYMINGTON † St Lawrence
2m/3km S. of Rushden
OS SP955643 GPS 52.2695N, 0.6016W
St Lawrence was begun in the mid-14th century by wool merchant John Curteys, who, with his wife, is buried in the chancel. This church must be an example of work carried out by masons based on jobs in the neighbouring county of Northamptonshire, but working here on a slightly tighter budget. All the Nene Valley features are to be seen, though delightfully out of scale, particularly in the tower and spire which are lavishly ornamented. The interior is rich and complex: a fine nave roof; the remains of a suitably horrific Doom painting; old pewing and some colour still on capitals and arches. The building provides the county’s best instance of the luxuriant spirit of the 14th century.
GREAT SHEFFORD: ST MARY – beautifully set on the slope of a shallow valley, the round tower as charming as it is rare in the county
Berkshire has several types of scenery. In the east of the county, on the London side, is much wild heath and pine-wood, the sort of country which, almost uninhabited until the 19th century, now grows public institutions like schools, prisons and barracks, and small modern villas along the main roads and by railways. The Thames forms the northern border, and here is orchard-land extending several miles south until the downs are reached. The south-west and west of the county are mostly chalk downs, and the scenery is similar to the Wiltshire downland into which it merges.
The older houses and farm buildings of these districts are timber, brick and cob, and generally thatched or red-tiled. The towns are all built of brick and are all, except for Reading, comparatively small.
Until the end of the 19th century, when transport from London turned half of the county into a semi-suburb, Berkshire was thinly populated. There the churches were cottage-like with wooden belfries, thatched barns, farms and houses of downland hamlets. A few small flint towers arose from pleasant red-brick towns beside the Thames and Kennet, and there still are a great many commons and heaths, such as were so beautifully described in the 1820s by Mary Russell Mitford in Our Village. The brickwork in Berkshire was never so impressive as that of Kent and Sussex. The eastern and London half of the county was transformed first by railways and again by buses, bringing more monied people from London, who settled down in detached residences wherever the train service was convenient. These people built themselves new churches, and rebuilt old ones.
Berkshire is not a great county for ancient churches. The only grand example is St George’s Chapel at Windsor (Perpendicular). Avington and Padworth have complete and small Norman churches. The best old churches will be found not in the Kennet valley, where these two are, but along the north slopes of the downs, to which stone for building could be brought fairly easily by river and then by trackway. The few big medieval churches of Berkshire, with the exception of Lambourn and Newbury, are in the northern half of the county. The churches on the downs and commons were nearly all small cottage-like buildings. One may see aquatints of some of them in Views of Reading Abbey and the Principal Churches Connected Therewith (1805), and in Buckler’s drawings in the British Museum. They had flint and rubble walls, rendered (or plastered) outside (the flint Norman tower of Great Shefford) were built circular, like many church towers in East Anglia, because of the lack of stone for the corners); the roofs were of tile with dormer windows, and there was usually a wooden belfry at the west end, and a 17th- or 18th-century porch in brick. Such buildings must have seemed very unecclesiastical to rich and pious landowners long or newly settled in Berkshire, which by the 19th century had become a ‘home county’ influenced by the prosperity of the metropolis. So they were pulled down or else vigorously restored, stripped of their external and internal plaster, retaining perhaps only an arcade or a window of the original building. Some churches of this small cottage type survive, as at Avington, East Shefford and Padworth.
The great Victorian architects left their mark on Berkshire. But because the county was not much industrialized until the 20th century, there is less Victorian building than in old Middlesex, Surrey or Kent. The architect G. E. Street, who lived at Wantage at the beginning of his successful career, designed many charming church schools and vicarages in the area and a bold new church and adjoining buildings at Boyne Hill, Maidenhead. Butterfield beautifully and conservatively restored Shottesbrooke and published a monograph about it. The best work of Victorian architects, together with that of the 18th and 19th centuries, is noted in the entries that follow. On the whole Berkshire has not been well served by those who rebuilt its churches. They had more money at their disposal than sensibility. But at least they built churches.
EAST SHEFFORD: ST THOMAS – a barn-like church, alone in a field between a farmhouse and a manor house, it holds within it the remnants of some fine wall-paintings
ALDERMASTON † St Mary the Virgin
8m/12km E. of Newbury
OS SU596649 GPS 51.3807N, 1.1442W
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