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St Nicholas, Little Braxted

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Essex is a county known for its attractive small towns, but perhaps Witham is not among them. However, across the A12 to the east a lane snakes up into wooded hills, and a short bike ride from Witham railway station brings us to the idyllic hamlet of Little Braxted with its watermill and its famous little church. Little Braxted was the home parish of one of the great Anglo-Catholic and architectural enthusiast priests of the late 19th Century, Father Ernest Geldart. His high quality work is familiar from church restorations across north Essex and Suffolk, mostly in carpentry and painted wood but also in murals, encaustic tiles and even in glass. St Nicholas was his church, and over twenty years at the end of the century he transformed it in his individualistic Arts and Crafts style. Externally it is a small church of the familiar Essex type, with a little wooden bell turret perched above the western gable end and a curved apse under the continuous roof to the east. The gable is half-timbered, a nice rustic touch. To step inside is to enter and immerse yourself in Geldart's High Church imagination, for almost every surface is stencilled, painted or gilded, glimmering in the dim light that filters through the windows that Geldart designed and which were as usual made for him by Cox, Sons & Buckley. It is all of a piece, something that photographs of individual details can perhaps not easily convey, for this is an interior which is far greater than the sum of its parts. The scheme happily survived the mid-20th Century reaction to Victorian excess, probably as a result of the church maintaining its High Church tradition, and was expertly restored in the early 1990s. There is one notable earlier survival, a fine family brass set to William Roberts, his wives Joyce and Margaret and their sons and daughters of 1518. By this date the figures are rather rustic of course, but the group is complete, and the inscription asking for our prayers for their souls and to commend those souls to the hands of God is untouched by 17th Century iconoclasts. Simon Knott, May 2020 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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