Roman Catholic Church of St Edmund King and Martyr, including the former private chapel to the rear of the adjoining presbytery (now the Blessed Sacrament Chapel), Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Summary

Roman Catholic parish church, built in 1836-1837 to designs by Charles Day of Worcester. It includes a former private, and illegal, chapel, built in 1761-1762 at the rear of the adjoining presbytery, formerly a mission house, which was rededicated and incorporated into the church in 1979 as the Blessed Sacrament Chapel.

Description

MATERIALS: of red brick with the entrance portico and dressings constructed from Ketton stone. The roof is concealed behind a stone-coped parapet.

PLAN: the church is rectangular-on-plan, aligned north to south, but the following description assumes conventional liturgical orientation i.e. as if the altar is located at the ‘east’ end. It includes an apsidal chapel adjoined to the rear of the adjoining presbytery at 21 Westgate Street (listed Grade II) but internally connected to the church.

EXTERIOR: the church is of a Greek Revival style, loosely based on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, and of a tall single storey. Its three-bay street frontage has stone steps rising to an imposing entrance portico in antis, with tall fluted Ionic columns and plain pilasters supporting a plain entablature with a triangular pediment surmounted by a replacement stone cross of 1921. The central entrance doorway has tall, panelled, double doors and the two flanking bays have multi-pane windows, all in tooled entablatures with moulded cornices. Its left-hand return has a blind window in an identical architrave.

The side returns are of plain red brick with a stone cornice band above which are five clerestory windows in recessed reveals with plain and coloured glazing with diamond-shaped quarries set within a diagonal lead lattice; the glass is believed to have come from Willow Lane Chapel, Norwich, in the 1980s, when it was converted to offices.

The apsidal Blessed Sacrament Chapel, which extends from the rear of the adjoining presbytery, has two, tall, six-over-six sashes, one unhorned and one horned, a cogged cornice and a slate roof.

INTERIOR: the vestibule has a stone-flagged floor with the flanking bays containing dog-leg with winder stone staircases with iron balustrades rising to the choir gallery. At each end, opposite the staircases, there are four-panel doors that originally gave access to the main body of the church (the left-hand door now obscured by a universal access toilet), and on the south side there is a half-glazed door to the adjoining presbytery. Commemorative monuments in the vestibule include: a marble memorial to the Hon Charles Petre (died 1854), with a bas relief of the Raising of Lazarus, signed R Brown of 58 Great Russell Street London; a round-headed plaque to Anne Frances Rushbrooke (died 1906); and a marble First World War memorial of 1927, with an additional panel for the Second World War dead. The surround to the central doorway to the nave, which was created around 1959, is a composite piece from an Adam-style marble chimneypiece from Rushbrooke Hall, Suffolk (demolished in 1961); the supports (outward-facing terms) are mid-C17 and Dutch, and the frieze is slightly earlier, possibly Tuscan, bearing the arms of the Farnese and della Rovere families. The half-glazed double-doors enclosed by the surround are set within panelled reveals and have square-pane glazing to the top half and two raised and fielded panels to the bottom, the mouldings enriched with an egg and dart motif.

The main body of the church has a pilastered interior, remodelled in 1877, with a west choir gallery, a short sanctuary set behind an in antis screen of two Ionic columns with flanking pilasters supporting a deep cornice to a glazed and deeply coved panelled ceiling with rosettes. The paint scheme dates from 2014, its marbling and stencilling informed to some extent by historical paint schemes.

The nave retains its original timber box pews, in four banks and each bearing Roman numerals, while the walls have plaster painted Stations of the Cross of 1925 by Messrs Vanpoulle of London (replacing a painted set installed in 1876) above which are shallow, round-headed recesses.

At the east end, the iron communion rails, sanctuary steps and mahogany pulpit are all original to the church, while the marble altar at the top of the sanctuary steps dates from 2014 and incorporates the base slab, mensa, columns and relics from a 1965 altar. The limed oak columnar ambo, placed on the sanctuary steps, also dates from 2014. A painting on copper in the apse depicts the Ascension and is by Robert Park of Preston, 1876, restored in 2021 by GH Pettit.

The apse is flanked by four-panel doors with flat hoods supported by heavy console brackets to the original sacristy (left-hand side) and parish library (right-hand side).

At the west end of the north side there is a marble Lady altar surmounted by a Carrara marble statue of Our Lady; the altar was given in 1920 by Henry Francis Harvey in memory of his son Lt Harry Thomas Harvey, killed in Ypres in 1917, while the statue was given by George Gery Milner-Gibson-Callum in memory of his mother, Susannah Arethusa; Fr Houghton (parish priest 1954-69) recorded that the statue originated from the workshop of the neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. The altar reredos, which is comprised of two repurposed doorcases of around 1735 from Rushbrooke Hall, has a lugged architrave framed by two Corinthian columns supporting an entablature with a decorative frieze, modillion cornice and triangular pediment. The fascia bears the inscription SALVE PORTA CAELI (Hail the Gates of Heaven) in painted gold letters.

Opposite the Lady altar, on the south side of the church, a tall, triangular-pedimented doorcase from Rushbrooke Hall frames the entrance to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, a former private, and illegal, chapel built in 1761-1762 at the rear of the adjoining presbytery (originally a mission house), and linked to the church and re-dedicated in 1979. The C18 doorway consists of a lugged architrave flanked by engaged fluted columns with stiff-leaf capitals standing on tall panelled pedestals. The columns support an entablature with a plain architrave bearing the inscription ECCE OSTIUM OVIUM (behold the gate of the sheepfold) in painted gold lettering along with a decorative frieze and a dentil and modillion cornice and pediment. A hanging sanctuary lamp in the doorway was a gift from Irish drovers in 1875.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel retains its original Lombard frieze and panelled gallery front, but the panelled wainscoting and the raised floor were inserted in 2012 when it was restored and redecorated, at which time the tabernacle and altar were also re-positioned. Two early-C21 half-glazed doors at the rear of the chapel give off to the confessional (left-hand side) and sacristy (right-hand side); both rooms retain no historic fixtures and fittings of note.

The church's contemporary crypt consist of three aisles formed by segmental-headed brick arcades.

History

In 1633, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) established a college in Bury St Edmunds, and for a short time during the reign of James II (1685-1688) ran a house, chapel and boys’ school within the bounds of the abbey ruins. The mission was supported by the Rookwood family of Coldham Hall, Stanningfield, Roman Catholic recusants whose notoriety rests on Ambrose Rookwood's involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, for which he was executed in 1606. Ninety years later his great-grandson, also called Ambrose, suffered the same fate for conspiring to assassinate William III. Much support came from Elizabeth Rookwood (died 1694), who is believed to have donated 50 chalices to their cause. The Glorious or Protestant Revolution of 1688, at which time the town had both a Catholic mayor and was the headquarters of the Jesuit mission of East Anglia, brought the mission to an end. The Jesuit presence in the town resumed in 1755, with the arrival of Fr John Gage SJ, the son of Elizabeth Rookwood Gage (1684-1759), heiress to the nearby Coldham Hall estate at Stanningfield and founder of a mission house at Coldham Cottage, Lawshall (Grade II, NHLE: 1375999). Fr Gage initially conducted Mass in secret in a house in Southgate Street, but in 1761-1762, with financial support from his brother, Thomas, and cousin, Sir William Gage, he built a mission house at 21 Westgate Street (Grade II, NHLE: 1142308), with a small, and still then illegal, chapel to the rear, with the first Mass being celebrated on 8 December 1762. In 1791, following the second Catholic Relief Act, the chapel was licensed for public worship, just one year after Fr Gage's death.

The Church of St Edmund King and Martyr was built alongside the Westgate Street mission house in 1836-1837, by Fr Joseph Tate SJ at a cost of £9,400, with the dwelling subsequently used as the presbytery. The architect was Charles Day of Worcester, whose design was loosely based on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, and the builder was Mr Newnham. The church, which opened on 16 November 1837 and dedicated on 14 December, was fitted out with box pews, for which rents were charged. A school was also established in the crypt (replaced by a separate school building in the presbytery grounds by 1881) which became a parish hall in 1919.

In 1876, the interior was elaborately redecorated to the designs of Fr IC Scoles SJ, with a painted representation of the Ascension in the apse, by Robert Park of Preston. The sanctuary pillars were also painted/marbled to complement the new scheme.

In September 1929, the Jesuits withdrew and diocesan priests assumed care of the mission.

Several notable enrichments were made by Fr Bryan Houghton, parish priest from 1954-69, including the importation in 1959 of several marble items from nearby Rushbrooke Hall prior to it being demolished in 1961, including a former chimneypiece which was used to frame a new central entrance door from the vestibule. In 1960, Fr Houghton commissioned, and personally paid, the German sculptor Maximilian Leuthenmayr to create a Baroque-style shrine to St Edmund, incorporating a painted wooden statue of the saint which had been donated to the church in 1887. It was surmounted by an C18 wooden carving of God the Father by the renowned Rococo sculptor Ignaz Gunther. God the Son was in the form of a processional cross, the corpus of Florentine Renaissance provenance, and the representation of the Holy Spirit was newly carved by Leuthenmayr. The shrine, however, was removed after Fr Houghton’s resignation in 1969 (in protest at the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council), but the statue of St Edmund remains. Fr Houghton also replaced the timber altar with a sarcophagus altar, essentially an Italian marble bath which was modified with the addition of clawed feet, marble columns and a marble top. It was consecrated by Bishop Parker of Northampton in 1965.

In 1979, under Fr Harry Wace, parish priest from 1977-82, the redundant private chapel at the rear of the adjoining presbytery, for which permission to demolish was refused in 1971, was incorporated into the church and rededicated as the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. The chapel’s gallery, however, was annexed with the insertion of a glazed screen to create a parish office accessible only from the presbytery.

In 2014, the church was reordered and redecorated under the direction of architect Charles Brown, who had also restored Charles Day's contemporary and almost identical church he had built for the Jesuits in Hereford, St Francis Xavier (Grade II*, NHLE: 1297462). The sarcophagus altar/bath was sold at auction for £3,600, but other parts of the 1965 altar were incorporated in a new smaller altar which was consecrated by Bishop Alan Hopes on 28 April 2014. Prior to this, Charles Day restored the crypt in 2011 and the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in 2012.

Reasons for Listing

The Roman Catholic Church of St Edmund King and Martyr, erected in 1836-1837 to a design by Charles Day of Worcester, incorporating a former private, and illegal, chapel built in 1761-1762 at the rear of the adjoining presbytery, which was incorporated into the church and rededicated as the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in 1979, is listed at Grade II* for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a particularly good and important example of a mid-C19 Roman Catholic church by the nationally renowned architect Charles Day, displaying high quality architectural detailing and decoration in a Greek Revival style;

* for its high-quality interior, despite having been re-ordered, contains a large number of superior fixtures and fittings, including the original box pews, a rare example in a Catholic church, and works by national and internationally important artists.

Historic interest:

* the former private, and illegal, chapel to the rear of the adjoining presbytery, now incorporated into the church as the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, is the oldest post-Reformation place of public Catholic worship in East Anglia.

Group value:

* it has a strong functional and historic relationship with the adjoining presbytery (listed Grade II), the two buildings representing continued public Catholic worship in Bury St Edmunds since 1762.

External Links

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.