St Mary's Church, South Tidworth

St Mary's Church in South Tidworth, Wiltshire, England, was built in 1878. It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building,[1] and is now a redundant church in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.[2]

St Mary's Church
LocationSouth Tidworth, Wiltshire, England
Coordinates51°13′42″N 1°39′52″W
Built1878
ArchitectJohn Johnson
Architectural style(s)Gothic Revival
Listed Building – Grade I
Designated7 March 1973[1]
Reference no.1093240
Location of St Mary's Church in Wiltshire

The church was built of rock faced brown stone, in a Gothic Revival style, by John Johnson, with work supervised by G.H. Gordon,[3] for Sir John Kelk,[2] near the site of an older medieval parish church.[4][5] Kelk, an engineer and major building contractor who owned the Tedworth House estate nearby, had previously worked with Johnson on the construction of the Alexandra Palace.[6] St Mary’s cost Kelk £12,000.[7]

The chancel is 28 feet (8.5 m) by 17 feet (5.2 m) and the three by nave 43 feet (13 m) by 17 feet (5.2 m). There are also north and south aisles and a north vestry and a south porch.[8] There is a bell turret with a tapering spire, also known as a flèche, at the top of a buttress on the west wall.[9] Pevsner describes the bell tower as "perverse and wilful...à la Burges".[7]

Pevsner considers the interior "sensational, in scale as in everything else".[7] It includes carvings and polished marble shafts in the columns of the arcade piers. The chancel floor is laid with Italian mosaic.[10] There is also a silver chalice and patens of 1837 and 1877 and a silver-gilt flagon of 1869.[8] The altar and stone carvings were built by Farmer & Brindley.[11] The stained glass is by Clayton and Bell apart from the east window which was designed by Heaton, Butler and Bayne.[11]

Outside the church is an avenue of yew trees the largest of which has a girth of 7 feet 9 inches (2.36 m).[12]

The church was declared redundant on 1 September 1972, and was vested in the Trust on 19 December 1973.[13] Access to the church is restricted after vandalism in 2016.[14][15]

See also
  • List of churches preserved by the Churches Conservation Trust in South West England

References
  1. Historic England. "Church Of St Mary, Tidworth (1093240)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 15 May 2014.
  2. St Mary's Church, South Tidworth, Wiltshire. Churches Conservation Trust. Retrieved 2 April 2011.
  3. "Church of St. Mary, South Tidworth". Wiltshire County Council. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
  4. "South Tidworth, St Mary's Church". Britain Express. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
  5. "The History of Tidworth". Tidworth Town Council. Retrieved 29 May 2020.
  6. "Charles Thomas Lucas at Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/49439. Retrieved 8 July 2011. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. Bullen et al. 2010, pp. 484-485.
  8. Page, William (1911). "Parishes: Tidworth, South". A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 4. British History Online. pp. 391–394. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
  9. "Church of St. Mary, South Tidworth". Wiltshire Community History. Wiltshire Council. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  10. "St Mary's Church, South Tidworth". Visit Wiltshire. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  11. "St Mary's, South Tidworth". Victorian Web. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
  12. Norton, Peter. "Wiltshire Yews An Inventory of Churchyard Yews Along the Bourne Valley" (PDF). Ancient Yews. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  13. Diocese of Salisbury: All Schemes (PDF). Church Commissioners/Statistics. Church of England. 2011. p. 9. Retrieved 2 April 2011.
  14. "Vandals target Tidworth church leaving trail of vomit, litter and damage". SpireFM. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  15. "Vandals leave vomit and litter inside church". Salisbury Journal. 2 June 2016. Retrieved 4 September 2016.

Sources
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