St Andrew, Guist

At first sight Guist appears an attractive village, but it is gutted by the awful Norwich to Fakenham road which steams straight through it. The church sits back from the road, but getting to it safely can be a challenge, and a sign at the gate when I visited in September 2022 told me that services were now on-line. As usual in this benefice the church is kept locked, but there is a key to be borrowed at the village shop which is unfortunately on the other side of the busy road. You approach the church up the wide sloping churchyard, and as you get closer you realise that it is not as large as its dominating position might suggest. It's hard to read the age of the nave and tower, and so perhaps it might be safest to say that an older church was considerably refurbished towards the end of the medieval period. The tall Perpendicular windows seem out of scale for the height of the nave, and the top of the tower is stark.

The crispness of the chancel betrays that it was completely rebuilt in the 1880s by diocesan surveyor Herbert Green. A plaque reveals that the porch was erected in memory of John Norris Spurgeon, vicar of this parish from 1861-1907... in fulfilment of his desire to complete the restoration of the church begun by him in 1889. The Norris family had long been lords of the manor of Guist as well as impropriators and patrons of the living, and Spurgeon's father had preceded him as rector of both Guist and neighbouring Twyford. Between them they had covered almost all of the 19th Century here.

The church you step into is pretty much entirely of the late 19th Century, including the north aisle and the arcade which were added at this time. Herbert Green went to town here, and I am afraid that the feel is of an anonymous urban interior which might easily be anywhere. The font is from the 1880s restoration, and the only survivals of any significance are the memorials. Those in the chancel are mostly to the Norris family, as you might expect, but gathered in the centre of the nave is a small collection of earlier memorials to the Wickes family. The most striking of these is a small coffin-shaped ledger to Bolely-Rice Wickes, who died at the age of just one month in 1736. Here, adrift among the encaustic tiles and and overshadowed by the varnished pitch-pine, the quiet piety of his inscription sets a different, older tone, just for a moment.

Simon Knott, September 2022

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