THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

home - index - latest - e-mail
links - small print - about this site
Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk

St Peter, Birch

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. Redundant, ruinous. A vast 19th Century church by Samuel Teulon. Completely out of scale for its village, with a landmark spire visible for miles around, wide aisles flanking the nave, and great windows in the Perp style punctuating the walls. The parish walked away from it in 1990, and in just 23 years it has decayed to the extent that the Church Commssioners have obtained a demolition order. It is those big windows which have been the cause of the trouble, of course, as the thin walls crack with the church settling on the soft ground. The bloke in the bungalow next door said that the Church Commissioners want to preserve the tower and build apartments against it, but the villagers want the whole lot demolished and replaced with a garden of remembrance. The churchyard is still in busy use, but the church is surrounded by a high, ugly corrugated iron fence, sprayed with graffiti. An ignominious end to what was obviously a superb building. Ironically, the church it replaced survives as a ruin nearby. Simon Knott, August 2013

 

Amazon commission helps cover the running costs of this site

 

home - index - latest - e-mail
links - small print - about this site
Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk