St John the Evangelist

St John’s church was consecrated in 1841. It is listed Grade II* and is a Gault brick, local ‘Woolpit White’, single cell church, built as a pre-Tractarian preaching box, which is rare in the region. It is now adapted to the needs of modern Anglican catholic worship, for which the absence of a dominant screened chancel is fortuitous.

It has a striking tower and spire at the western end, which is also (unusually) constructed in brick and is now home to 60 nest boxes for swifts. It is the most significant ecclesiastical building undertaken by William Ranger and it possesses a raw energy that slightly later, academic gothic revival buildings lack.

The building is innovative in many ways, for instance, St John’s is an early example of cavity wall construction. There are several stained glass windows, including one of the Epiphany by CE Kempe, with his wheatsheaf emblem, in the north aisle. The east window from 1856 is by Forrest and Bromley of Liverpool, although the original surrounds were replaced by modern tinted glass in 1960. The striking and impressive east window of the south aisle from around 1863 depicts St John on Patmos and is by Heaton, Butler and Bayne: ‘Clear hand of Bayne and demonstrating the new design freedom of the early 1860s’ (Birkin Haward).

The catholic tradition has affected the internal development of the building that began in 1875 with the rearrangement by the architect Drayton Wyatt of the east end. The Lady/Blessed Sacrament Chapel was refitted in 1948 and there was further reordering and a new decorative scheme in the 1990s. The acclaimed set of Stations of the Cross by the artist Iain McKillop was commissioned by the church and installed in 2008.