St Mary, Gillingham

Gillingham has three churches all in a line, all cut off from their village by the busy Norwich to Beccles road. To the north is the ruin of the medieval church of All Saints, to the south the splendid and idiosyncratic 1890s Catholic church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. St Mary is the middle one, and is in many ways the most interesting of the three, but it is kept locked without a keyholder, and so I suppose it is little-known.

At first sight it appears to be a Norman cruciform church with a central tower, but a second glance tells us that something is not quite right, for the crossing is towards the western end of the structure rather than the east. In fact it was almost entirely rebuilt in the 1860s by the Lowestoft architect Thomas Penrice, who had been a pupil of George Gilbert Scott. As Pevsner observes, one can only marvel at his self assurance and that of his client the Reverend John Farr, both convinced that they could do Norman better than, at least the local, Normans. The part west of the tower is old but truncated, the west doorway moved eastwards, and the part of the church east of the tower is all Penrice's work, a substantial nave and south aisle leading to an apsed chancel, all built on a much larger scale than the original chancel which had stood on this side of the tower. As Bill Wilson observed in the revised Buildings of England, the west window of the south aisle has so much nailhead ornament... one feels one could saw wood with it.

I was pleased to see inside in the winter of 2005 when we quite by chance found the churchwarden in the churchyard and he offered to show us inside. The photographs below were taken on that occasion. We stepped into the area west of the tower and saw that, curiously, the truncated medieval roof survives above, the discarded part of it apparently reused for the new nave with the addition of 19th Century wall posts and angels .Another surprising survival under the circumstances is a section of medieval screen which now hangs on the north wall. The dedicatory inscription along the top is to members of the Corder family and is in English, but the beginning words Pray for the Sowle of... have been scratched out by iconoclasts.

The Kenyon family of the Hall were received into the Catholic Church in the 1890s and built Our Lady of Perpetual Succour beside St Mary for their own use, any patronage they might once have had of the parish church falling into abeyance, and in truth there is a feeling here that not much has happened since the 20th Century began. The church fell into disuse in the early years of the current century, although in 2016 it was in occasional use by the Orthodox congregation based a few miles off at Mettingham and as far as I am aware it has never been declared redundant. The church is still kept locked without a keyholder notice although a notice on the south doorway in October 2021 claimed it is open for a few hours on a Sunday.

Simon Knott, October 2021

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