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St Bartholomew, Wickham Bishops

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A hilltop village, and at its heart a grand and yet likeable High Victorian church. The architect was Ewan Christian, and as James Bettley observes, it was to an ambitious design, relatively early in his prolific career. The language of the building is Early English, and it manages to be ample in size without appearing to sprawl or dominate its neighbours. There are aisles but no clerestory, and the tower builds to a splendid broach spire with lucarnes, a restrained Victorian fantasia. It was built in memory of the Reverend Edward Leigh, but effectively it was to replace the much smaller parish church of St Peter which sits nearly a mile outside the village in the fields off of the road to Maldon. The porch contains what appears to be a 12th Century holy water stoup which may have come from the old church, and you step past it into a clean, light, open interior retaining its original mid-19th Century furnishings, a feeling of High Church gravitas without gloom. Everything was new. And then in 1911 there was a refurnishing of the chancel, presumably to lift it up a gear into Anglo-Catholic territory, including glass by the firm of Gamon & Humphry of Fitzroy Square, London. It depicts the Adoration of the Magi and Shepherds in an Arts and Crafts style. Below the glass, the contemporary reredos forms a shelf running right across the chancel from north to south with panels depicting saints, and the finishing touch is the painted altar, the Lamb of God worshipped by angels, a perfect setting for the incense-led worship of the time. This parish has one very odd claim to fame. During the Commonwealth, when the Church of England was suppressed and all manner of weird and wonderful fundamentalist sects were let off the leash, the intruder minister at St Bartholomew's predecessor church of St Peter was the puritan preacher Joseph Billio. It is said that his sermons were delivered with such speed and gusto that they gave rise to the expression 'to go like Billio'. Whether this is true or not I do not know, but It must be said that he actually achieved his fame as a preacher at the nearby Maldon Congregational chapel. Simon Knott, December 2021 Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.

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