Hemmed in as it is by the Great Ouse to the west, the Woottons form the largest part of King's Lynn's suburbia, stretching out for a couple of miles towards Castle Rising and the Sandringham estate. Most of this is late 20th Century housing, but both Wootton churches are pleasingly set in the oldest parts of their parishes giving them a rural feel, and both are welcoming and open every day, a model for suburban parishes in Norfolk. South Wootton church is unfamiliar if you are used to the flinty churches of East Anglia, for like several in this part of the county its main building materials are carrstone and brick, giving it a kind of choc-chip-cookie effect. This was an early church, perhaps even pre-Conquest, rebuilt in the 14th Century. The tower was rebuilt in the 1890s, the decade which also brought the vestry on the north side of the chancel, but you enter through a well-designed west end narthex of 1985 that forms not only an entrance porch but meeting rooms, a kitchen and toilets.

You step into an interior which is pretty much entirely late 19th Century in feel, and yet it is unfamiliar if we are used to restorations of this date, for it has an Arts and Crafts feel to it, with a hammerbeam roof of the 1880s that turns competently into the stubby transepts. The great exception to this impression though is one of the most memorable of north-west Norfolk's group of square 12th Century fonts. A snarling grotesque in each corner gives no doubt that for the early church Baptism was a defensive process.

The 1920s glass in the south transept is by Hardman & Co, and is curiously insubstantial, depicting the Blessed Virgin and child flanked by the Annunciation and the Nativity within a largely clear context. Below it are a piscina and what must have been an aumbry, two of the few survivals from the early 14th Century rebuilding. The chancel arch and chancel are strikingly narrow. In the sanctuary is a large tombchest, commemorating Sir Thomas Winde, who died in 1603. It is set into the north chancel wall as if it is an Easter sepulchre, although obviously it is seventy years too late for that. It's likely that Sir Thomas's executors had a long memory of what was fitting.

Looking back west, the 1985 gallery has a 19th Century frontage taken from the closed church of St Matthew in Norwich. Up in the gallery there is an extraordinary hearse, dated 1611, with scriptural inscriptions. South Wootton church is a good example of a medieval church refashioned and refurbished over the centuries for changing fashions and emphases in liturgy and worship. That it continues to be not only open and welcoming but also seemly and fitting for its purpose today makes it a credit to its parish.

Simon Knott, April 2023

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