[89563] St Saviour, Eastbourne : Font

St Saviour, South Street, Eastbourne, East Sussex, 1865-67.

By George Edmund Street (1824-1881).

Grade ll* listed.

 

Baptistry.

The Font is to Street's design.

It is of Mexican onyx and has a counterweighted, tall Gothic cover with gables round the sides and a spirelet capping.

The marble bowl was given in memory of the infant son of Henry Robert Whelpton.

 

Eastbourne was expanding rapidly, its development having been stimulated by the arrival of the railway in 1849 which encouraged people to live or spend time here in the summer. The seventh Duke of Devonshire, who owned much land in the area, had started to lay out a new town to the south and west of the old town. This new development was at a considerable remove from the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, and the establishment of a new Anglican place of worship was encouraged by the vicar of Eastbourne, aided by a local benefactress, Harriott Manby, and her wealthy friend, George Whelpton, whose son was to become the first vicar. The family fortune was made out of Whelpton's pills, a patent medicine produced by George Whelpton and Son in Louth, Lincolnshire. The site was given by the Duke of Devonshire. The foundation stone was laid on 17 October 1865 and the church was consecrated by the Bishop of Chichester on 31 January 1867. The churchmanship was in the Tractarian tradition, hence the attention paid to having fine architecture, fittings and embellishments.

Done