Framed by bits of storm debris — grass seeds at this end and distally a piece punched from a pumpkin leaf — this is the successful result of pre-germinating fenugreek seeds. That's right; they went in on the third of the month and have their cotyledons up and unfurling on the sixth.

Of course, I knew it would work; I've done it before. But, shush, don't give away my growing secrets or everyone will be doing it.

Radishes are renowned rocket ships when it comes to germination. So too is, err, rocket, or arugula if you prefer. The first hint of a radish sown at the same time as these is just poking it's head up now, a day and a half later; a veritable sluggard compared to this technique.

I can almost smell one of Cook's lamb and methi pies! She'd use mutton, if she could get it, but for some reason the market can't wait and instead prefers characterless lamb over tasty hogget and magnificent mutton. Enough musing on the urgency of today's consumers; now that I'm down here, how do I get up again?

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

These buildings which are hard to find any information on are/were on the corner of regency road and Churchill road in Kilburn in Adelaide Australia. It is very hard to find any information on these buildings, they are railway buildings on railway land and they may have been a part of the Tube Mills set of factories built in 1938 (seen in old image here, the buildings shape and windows makes me think they are from around the 1940's so this would line up. Unfortunately these buildings time is up, with the local council saying "Old railway land and buildings on north west corner of intersection is an eysore. The site has enormous potential" [1] . I though that these buildings could have been made into a feature, like a library, botanic garden greenhouse, bus interchange even shopping or loft housing. But no they are being bulldozed, sad day to see in my opinion, no doubt to be replaced with characterless concrete prefab buildings.

This is for @dailyshoot s assignment #ds439 Today's theme is red. Red hot? Red paint? Or something else? You decide. These are Red Brick buildings, I would have loved to get closer but a 6" high fence and guards stopped me getting any closer. I really like the windows down the side of the left building and the shadows of the steel girders on the windows. I really do think this is a great loss loosing building of this character. One thing that does make me happy is the other buildings are heritage listed AND are still being used as a tube mill but this time they are for wind turbines.

Here are a few other images and a short wiki article on the tube mills:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Mills_railway_station,_Adelaide

www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/heritage/photodb/imagesear...

www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/heritage/photodb/imagesear...

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

German postcard by Photochemie, Berlin, K.2855. Photo: Rexfilm. Bernd Aldor in Die Liebe des van Royk (Lupu Pick, 1917). Though the woman right of Aldor looks like Ria Jende, she is not named among the actress in www.filmportal.de. the postcard names the character von Royk instead of van Royk.

Plot: The dramatic love story takes place in diplomatic circles in the Middle East. The Dutchman Artur van Royk looks back on a memorable event that happened four years ago. On his yacht, he was celebrating the birthday of the Dutch Queen when he was told that an uninvited guest had climbed onto his sailboat. This man asked for protection because he claimed to be persecuted. Van Royk granted the protection, and today he meets this man again. The persecuted, called Mehmed Pasha (Ernst Rappeport or Rudolf Hofbauer ), is now Chief of Police of Turkestan, where van Royk today takes up his duties as Dutch ambassador. Via Mehmed Pasha, Van Royk meets Lady Mary Romney (Charlotte Schulz). the wife of his English colleague Romney (Magnus Stifter). She is a quiet creature who is maltreated by her characterless man. He wants to divorce her because Romney intends to marry his cousin Ruth (Käthe Wittenberg). In addition, Romney seeks to have custody of and Mary's child and requires his still-wife to sign a waiver in the event of a divorce. But as a loving mother, she defends herself with her hands and feet against this immoral request.

Van Royk falls in love with the benevolent British lady and promises to help Mary when Romney, with the help of a common feint who hatched his secretary, still gets the signature. Van Royk, for Mary's sake, desperately wants to get back the signed signature and disguises herself as a harem lady, so he can go anywhere near Romney. But the British ambassador recognizes his Dutch counterpart. When he pulls out a dagger, it comes to a scuffle, in which Romney dies. In his distress, van Royk tells Mehmed of the bloody deed. Since he once owes his savior a favor, Mehmed Pasha blames the act on a man who is already serving five murders. By his rescue act, van Royk hopes to gain the love of the now widowed Mary. On the way back from Romney's house, van Royk suddenly sees the figure of the dead Romney sitting across the boat. Van Royk must realize that as long as he is with Mary, the widow of the dead, the shadow of Romney would always stand between them. So he voluntarily renounces his happiness and leaves the country without his great love.

Source: German Wikipedia, filmportal.de, IMDB.

Bernd Aldor (1881 - 1950) was a star of the German silent cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, often in films by Richard Oswald or Lupu Pick. Sound film and the Nazi regime broke the career of this Jewish actor.

Upon arrival at Perth with 1S16 on the adjacent platform 7 I had five minutes station time to spare so I decided to take a look behind the wall.

Some seeing this will recall these sidings used for stabling a variety of loco types during the 1970's and 1980's. Classes 08/20/24/25/26/27/37/40/47 were commonplace here. In the early 1970's even the occasional D400 could be seen here.

Its sad to see what the modern characterless unit focused railway has cast aside.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

The different profiles of Roe (No.918, left) and Metro-Cammell (933, right) bodywork are readily apparent in this shot of two of Devon General's Leyland Atlanteans, taken inside Newton Rd. garage in July 1980.

Both have been "decorated" with uni-bus ad's, 918 for a local night spot, and 933, (former "Sea-Dog" convertible "Sir Walter Raleigh"), for a Newton Abbot double-glazing firm.

918 had for some years been more or less abandoned with several of its sisters out on the grassy "death row", where it had been cannibalised for spares since withdrawal in 1976.

It was completely refurbished and given a new lease of life, albeit only for a few months.

One of the "Warship" class of convertible Bristol VRs nudges in from the left. These were the rather characterless replacements for Sea-Dogs.

A derelict warehouse sadly destined for demolition and replaced no doubt by a characterless modern structure

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

random newish English soulless characterless boring red brick somewhere in NW5

The delightful Leicestershire village of Ashby Magna was once lit by a number of quaint tungsten lamped lanterns mounted beneath wonderfully ornate semi-circular brackets attached to roadside wood poles. Sadly, over the years these little rural lanterns have been replaced with characterless plastic modern affairs (as above).

To attach the dreadful modern side-entry fittings, the original brackets have been butchered to accommodate the replacements. This sort of thing has happened all over the country in the last 20 years or so, which impacts on local heritage, bringing city style blandness to these rural backwaters.

The last of the old tungsten lanterns on the original brackets disappeared about 12-months ago, but thanks to the Clerk of the Parish Council, the complete fitting is now safely saved to my collection.

St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk

Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.

If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.

To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.

The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.

The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.

If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.

Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.

The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.

Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.

There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.

Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

It's such a waste to demolish such a well-kept space. This particular section does not really show its age, unlike much of the rest of the site.

Note the proximity of the new school through the wallbars and windows!

Although only a few years separate their completion, the Lower School Buildings seem to be built to a much higher standard than the Upper School extensions, which date from 1969, but seem more bland, characterless and insubstantial.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk

Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.

If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.

To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.

The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.

The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.

If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.

Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.

The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.

Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.

There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.

Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.

St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk

Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.

If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.

To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.

The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.

The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.

If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.

Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.

The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.

Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.

There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.

Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk

Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.

If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.

To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.

The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.

The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.

If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.

Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.

The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.

Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.

There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.

Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

So I've had the old girl on the road since September now, it's done about 1500 miles since bringing the mileage up to 49000 miles and it's still preforming perfectly.

I've had a few teething problems, the starter motor needed a clean, the sunroof had to be sealed as it dripped in all this heavy rain and the indicator relay broke but other than that it's been fine.

I still haven't really gelled to the car though mainly from the fact that it cost me so much and it's a bit characterless so i fancy a change again.

St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk

Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.

I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.

There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.

But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.

Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.

Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.

St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.

It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.

By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.

A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.

I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.

And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.

I am really happy to have at last managed to get a copy of this rare and quite sought after book: it is Outrage, by the Architectural critic Ian Nairn (1930-83), being a 1959 book based on a piece published by the Architectural Review in 1955. The full title of this large-format, but slim volume is Outrage on the Disfigurement of Town & Countryside. Nairn's point was that towns should be urban and celebrated for their urban character, not dressed up as twee extensions of mock rurality, and that the country should be pastoral & distinct from the towns. He hated what he termed subtopia, a suburban nether-World of characterless pseudo-country cottage housing that he as creeping both into towns and the country. He also hated needless clutter - ugly street furniture, uneccessary signs and the like. A brilliant book, no doubt, with much to ponder upon: it takes the form of a journey from Southampton to Carlisle, where, in a series of photos, Nairn demonstrates how the outskirts of Southampton look pretty much like the outskirts of Carlisle, and how all between was slowly being reduced into a bland uniformity.

He later explored the same theme in other books, notably Your England Revisited (1964).

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

Photographed circa.1991 Canon AV-1+28 mm/2.8. red filter.This lamp-standard stood near the Crwys Rd. Police Station.Now replaced by a characterless modern version.Jessops KB17 B&W film developed in Jessops "ECONOTOL" film developer.

All Saints, Fornham All Saints, Suffolk

What would have been a simple late 13th Century church was radically altered with the addition of aisles and a transept in the early 16th Century, and then a major 1860s restoration by Arthur Blomfield left it looking crisp, if a llittle characterless inside. The church is a landmark in the busy northern suburbs of Bury St Edmunds.

More: www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/fornhamas.html

St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk

Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.

The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.

Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.

And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.

This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.

However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.

This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.

There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.

Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.

Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.

The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.

Anita and I went out for a short stroll through our neighbourhood (cookie cutter houses in the middle of surburban Calgary). It is a very characterless area, but something in my gut told me to bring a camera along. Amazingly, I found this truck parked on the street behind a long row of modern vehicles.

Super Richoflex TLR on Velvia 100. Why I haven't shot more with this camera, I have no idea. I LOVE IT.

St Martin, Overstrand, Norfolk

Like several churches in this part of the world, St Martin was in a very bad state by the 19th century, with only part of its nave still in use for worship, and the decision was made to rebuild it. It seems to have been a north Norfolk fashion to rebuild on a new site, and so when Christ Church was erected in the churchyard beside St Martin in 1867, St Martin was left as a picturesque ruin. However, in 1883, Clement Scott eulogised this area in an article written for the Daily Telegraph, and the legend of Poppyland, a dreamlike English idyll, was born.

The north Norfolk coast became a popular holiday destination, thanks to Scott's writing and the opening up of the area by the railways. Perhaps a characterless Victorian church did not fit in with Scott's vision of what Poppyland was, and what people might find there. The medieval parish church at neighbouring Sidestrand had been rebuilt on a new site in an entirely medieval round-towered style, and so it was that Christ Church was demolished, and the ruin of St Martin restored to something approaching its former glory. The architects were Cecil Upcher and AJ Lacey, and the church was opened on the eve of the First World War.

The reconstruction coincided with the pre-War triumphalism of the Church of England, which was at that time at its highest point in the national consciousness, but the project demanded a rigorously vernacular style, and so too many excesses were avoided. The guardian angel in his niche on the south side is not a taste of things to come, because you step into a relatively plain and simple interior which is full of light from the clear glass windows. The only colour comes from a vibrant east window depicting Christ in Majesty with St Cuthbert and St Martin accompanied by otters, dogs and ducks above scenes of Durham and Tours cathedrals. The aisle and chancel are by Upcher & Lacey, the north doorway surviving to create an unusual opening between aisle and nave. Mortlock says the current south porch was originally on the north side. Arthur Mee says that the old font was found in a garden.

Although Overstrand is in many ways still a remote backwater, the memorials and headstones here record links to some of the 19th century's most significant philanthropic families, including members of the Buxton and Gurney families as well as Lady Battersea, who was one of the Rothschilds.

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was the millionaire owner of Truman's brewery. He married Elizabeth Fry's sister, and as MP for Weymouth and the Isle of Portland he spoke strongly in parliament for the abolition of all slavery, even after the ending of the slave trade. It is said that his advocacy of the extension of liberty in Africa through the influence of legitimate trade under the protection of Christianity inspired the Scottish doctor, David Livingstone, to go to Africa as a missionary.

Tragedy haunted Buxton and his wife Hannah: four of their children died during an outbreak of whooping cough in the early spring of 1820. Buxton himself never came to terms with his failure to eradicate slavery from Africa; he died in 1845, and was buried here. His memorial is inside the church, but he was also to be found on a recent British five pound note, where he was the spectacled figure standing to the left of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Fry.