Other buildings of King's Sutton

There has been a gap of forty years between editions of the Northamptonshire Buildings of England. Bridget Cherry was Nikolaus Pevsner’s partner in 1973, but the newly-published one has been the work of Bruce Bailey.

And while the book has roughly doubled in size, the entry concerning our village, King’s Sutton, remains virtually untouched at a little less than two pages, over half of it devoted to the parish church, plus (briefly) two other churches and two houses (the Manor and its near neighbour the Court House).

 

Mr Bailey perhaps came here on a wet Tuesday.

Buildings that might have made their presence felt by now could include the Neo-Gothic Old School House of 1847 and the Lutyens-style St Rumbolds of 1922; a number of interesting 18^th century dwellings (Lovells and the Bell House in The Square); some 17^th century cottages of character (Monks Cottages, also in The Square, Q Cottage in Wales Street – yes, really, Q-shaped – and the Old Lace House in Astrop Road). Also, up towards nearby Astrop, the 18^th century Gate House with its interesting semi-circular gable end, College Farm and the mysterious Grey Court and its various subsidiary buildings of note.

An interesting discovery of recent times at the parish church, not noticed by Mr Bailey, are the sculptured forms of St Peter and St Paul, high up on the west face of the tower. They were first noticed by a visiting Australian chorister from Oxford, and they appear to the naked eye to be far earlier than the fourteenth century building of the tower – perhaps saved from a previous building campaign.   

Maybe, a further forty years from now, another edition will appear with some of the above included. Just a thought.     

Oxfordshire’s Best Churches

I have a couple of dozen tomes by Nikolaus Pevsner, each one detailing every building of note in the counties of England, but the book that has been at the heart of my ecclesiastical tourism around England has always been John Betjeman’s Pocket Guide to English Parish Churches. Published in 1958 it covers some 2,000 examples.  

In that I’ve recorded every visit I’ve made to an Anglican church since the mid-1960s, so I’ll be coming up to half a century quite soon. The most visited counties over that time are Kent (97 churches) and Oxfordshire (52). I used to live near the former, and am now adjacent to the latter.

So it’s a pleasure to be able to recommend a new book, Oxfordshire’s Best Churches by Richard Wheeler. It is well-researched and beautifully written, dealing in detail with the architecture, sculpture and stained glass of fifty buildings covering a thousand years of creativity and change. Shamefully, I’ve only been inside eleven of them. And there are shorter entries on a further sixty-five, together with superb photography (taken by the author) and nice typography throughout.

Altogether a joy to have. Enthused by it, we visited one of the most charming and atmospheric in the county, North Stoke.