The parish of Thorpe St Andrew is a hearty chunk of pleasant Norwich suburbia beside the River Yare. It still has a sense of being a place apart, and as Bill Wilson reminds us in his revision of the Buildings of England volumes for Norfolk, it was entirely separate until the 20th Century. This belies the fact that this church is barely twenty minutes brisk walk from Norwich railway station. Adjacent Thorpe Hamlet has always been within the city boundaries, but Thorpe St Andrew is still in the Broadland District Council area. The church will be a familiar sight to anyone entering Norwich from Great Yarmouth by the old road, and, indeed, by the river. The most striking thing about it is that it has two towers. One is medieval and ruined, the other is 19th Century and tall. Before 1944 this latter tower was even more striking, for it was surmounted by a 150ft spire, making it a counterpoint to the Cathedral. Nearby bombing during the Norwich blitz made the spire unsafe, and it was taken down in 1944 to be replaced by a not wholly successful broach cap.

The medieval church had been rebuilt in the late 15th Century, but on a small scale. Interestingly, the tower was on the south side, one of about thirty churches like this in East Anglia, mostly in Suffolk. By the time of the 1851 census Thorpe St Andrew had a population of well over a thousand people, and the little church was quite inadequate. To replace it, a large and completely urban church was built in the 1860s behind it to the designs of that most quirky of 19th Century architects Thomas Jekyll, whose contemporary Holt Methodist Church makes an interesting comparison. The new St Andrew was squeezed into the northern side of the churchyard, making full use of the available space. The great tower forms a south porch beneath it, and some of the wall memorials from the old church were reset below the tower, including one of 1811 to Elizabeth Meadows Martineau, a rector's daughter who had married into that famous Norwich family. Her Coade Stone memorial, a material popular in the early part of the 19th Century, was made by the firm of Coade & Sealey. The font from the old church was moved into the new, and then in the 1880s the old St Andrew was ruinated, making a picturesque feature in the churchyard. The old tower was retained as a walkway through to the new church, which it remains as to this day. You step into a church which can at first feel a little gloomy, because Jekyll designed a huge, shadowy temple perfectly suited to Anglo-Catholic worship. At its heart is an imposing rood screen.

It was installed in the 1920s as a war memorial, although it looks fully the work of the pre-WWI era, and the extraordinary figures painted on it are reminiscent of those featured on the reredos a short distance away at St Lawrence. They represent the Apostles, but their faces are those of late Victorian and Edwardian worthies, and include bishops, nobles, civic notables and even a figure representing St John who is described by Mortlock as 'an anonymous American actress'! Arthur Mee named some of the others as Lord Leighton, Lord Salisbury, Bishop King of Lincoln, General Booth of the Salvation Army, a local Quaker called Mr Birkbeck, a Canon Liddon and an Admiral de Ruyter.

This is a quirky building to say the least, and the powerful, blockish arcade separating off the south aisle from the nave, with its capitals studded with flowers, pelicans and angels, is certainly striking. Pevsner thought it monstrous. It leads you eastwards to a south aisle chapel that was cloaked with a Ukrainian flag when I visited in July 2022, a counterpoint to the banners of union flags criss-crossing the nave to celebrate the late Queen's platinum jubilee. The chancel takes the form of an octagonal apse, with narrow lancets to light it with colour from images of saints. It feels almost an afterthought after the grandness of the nave and aisle.

But in any case the best glass is in the south aisle, all of it of the 20th Century. The most interesting is a memorial window to William Birkbeck who died in 1916. It depicts, in twin roundels, Magdalene College, Oxford and the Moscow Kremlin, as a reminder of the work Birkbeck did to establish relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church. Above them are the figures of St John the Baptist and St John the Divine. The workshop appears to be unrecorded, but I wonder if it may be by Herbert Bryans who might also be responsible for some of the other glass here. Further west is John Blyth's 1983 glass commemorating the families of all those who served their country, a depiction of Christ with Martha and Mary at Bethany. The great east window is by King & Son, most likely the work of studio artist Paul Jefferies.

Simon Knott, October 2022

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