St Mary Magdalene Church - Windmill Hill, Enfield, London, UK
N 51° 39.240 W 000° 05.842
30U E 700780 N 5726546
The 1883 Anglican church stands on the north side of Windmill Hill at the junction with The Ridgeway.
Waymark Code: WMJD09
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 11/01/2013
Views: 1
The
church's website tells us:
What is now the parish of St Mary Magdalene was no
more than forest and farmland for hundreds of years; only a windmill
standing at the south end of the Ridgeway was of any interest to mapmakers
until Victorian times.
For centuries, the area was part of royalty's Enfield Chase hunting grounds
and its few inhabitants were served spiritually by St Andrew's, Enfield.
The extension of the Great Northern Railway to Enfield Chase in the latter
half of the 19th century opened up the neighbourhood as part of a rapidly
growing London suburb.
Large sections of land on the Bycullah, Ridgeway Park and Old Park estates,
as well as glebe lands at the junction of the Ridgeway and Windmill Hill,
were snapped up by developers. Their brief was to erect 'villas of character
to suit professional and business men' migrating from the inner suburbs.
As the spacious houses and gardens sprang up and became occupied, it became
clear that the well-heeled new residents also required a place for their
Christian worship. Salvation came in the form of Georgiana Hannah Twells,
widow of the eminent banker and City of London MP, Philip Twells, with whom
she had lived at Chase Side House on the site of what is now the Enfield
Library.
Mrs. Twells planned the church as a memorial to her husband and she
recruited the renowned Victorian Architect, William Butterfield, to turn her
dream into reality. Georgiana herself laid the foundation stone on Saturday,
17 December 1881. Just 20 months later on 18 July 1883 St Mary Magdalene
Church was consecrated by the Bishop of London, the Rt Hon and Rt Revd Dr
John Jackson.
The sermon that day was given by the Revd W D Maclagan, the Bishop of
Lichfield, and former vicar at St Andrew's, Enfield, who later became
Archbishop of York.
Georgiana Twells died in 1898 and is buried alongside her husband in
Lavender Hill Cemetery.
The parish has changed considerably since her day. The large houses and
farms that characterised it at the end of the 19th century have largely been
replaced by smaller houses and more recently by blocks of flats. The number
of parishioners has grown accordingly.
Now, as well as a centre of worship, the church is a focal point for the
community and its facilities are used throughout the week by a wide variety
of groups and associations.
The church is Grade II* listed with the entry at the
English Heritage website telling us:
1881-3 by William Butterfield. 1897-9 chancel
embellishments by Charles Buckeridge, Edward Turner and N H J Westlake.
1907-8 Lady Chapel added.
MATERIALS: Rock-faced coursed Kentish ragstone with Bath stone dressings.
Red clay tile roofs.
PLAN: Nave, chancel, N and S aisles, S porch, N and S transepts, S chapel, N
vestry and organ chamber.
EXTERIOR: The most distinctive feature is the spire, a dramatic tall pyramid
with horizontal banding and one tier of lucarnes. The rest of the building
is in a style of 1300 and is 'unremarkable' (Cherry and Pevsner). The tower
is of four stages with angle buttresses to the first stage and a half, then
turning to clasping ones which rise right up to the base of the spire. A
square SE stair turret rises to halfway up the third stage. There is a
three-light W window while the belfry windows are paired two-light openings
to the W and E and two-light openings to the N and S. The form of the
tracery is conventional Geometrical work with a cusped circle in the head.
This form is repeated in the other ground floor windows while the clerestory
has cusped Y-tracery openings. The S porch has a moulded arched entrance
with one order of shafting. There is chequerwork in the gable and
chequerwork also appears in the gable of the chancel. At the SE is a chapel
under its own gable. Low transepts run off from the W parts of the chancel:
the N transept has a hipped roof.
INTERIOR: Apart from the paintings in the chancel the walls are plastered
and whitened. The nave has three wide arches to the aisles and a narrow one
at the W which corresponds with the entrance alleyway from the S porch. The
arches are double-chamfered, and the piers, of red sandstone, are round with
moulded circular capitals. The chancel arch has an outer moulding while the
inner order springs from a colonette which rises from a fluted corbel. There
are similar arches to the transepts. The nave has canted roof with embattled
tie-beams. The chancel has a six-sided canted ceiling divided into
rectangular panels by ribs. The aisle roofs are lean-tos.
PRINCIPAL FIXTURES: The chancel is very richly adorned. The ceiling over the
choir was decorated in 1898 to designs by Edward Turner of Leicester,
brother of the then vicar, the Rev George Turner. The paintings of angels
holding emblems of the Passion on the sanctuary ceiling are the work of
Charles Buckeridge; his also are the designs for the paintings on the E wall
which include depictions of the Magi and Shepherds. The marble facing round
the sanctuary is also the work of Turner. Original Butterfield work occurs
in the reredos which is architectural rather than figurative with a central
feature silhouetted against the E window and with square corner pinnacles.
The triple sedilia with their ogee tops to the openings are also
Butterfield¿s: unusually they have movable wooden stools for seats rather
than fixed stone benches; big, quatrefoiled roundels sit in the valleys
between the arches. The stalls are by Butterfield too and have traceried
fronts with pierced quatrefoils. The wooden chancel screen of 1898 has now
been moved to the W end where it screens off the N-S alleyway. The floor of
the chancel is laid with Minton's encaustic tiles and multi-coloured tiles
floor the nave and aisle alleys. Red tiles are used to line the lower part
of the walls of the aisles. In the nave and aisles the bench seating is low
and is of a type, with rounded shoulders, much favoured by Butterfield. At
the W end there is a fine font, characteristic of Butterfield, with an
octagonal marble bowl with sides with gabled, trefoiled arches carried on
dark marble shafts: central octagonal drum. The wooden polygonal pulpit, of
two tiers on a stone base, has pierced tracery and is by Butterfield. There
is extensive stained glass by Heaton, Butler and Bayne.
SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: Former parsonage to the N by Butterfield, 1882 (listed
separately).
HISTORY: The need for a church in this expanding area in the late 19th
century was met by Georgiana Hannah Twells, the widow of the banker and MP
for the City of London, Philip Twells. She conceived the church as a
memorial to him and the foundation stone was laid on 17 Dec 1881 with the
consecration by Bishop Jackson of London taking place on 18 July 1883. The
church comes from the latter period of Butterfield's career and, like other
later churches of his, lacks the fire and inspiration which he brought to
his work in the 1840s to 1860s and which helped forge the nature of High
Victorian Gothic. The building, however, has been much enhanced by the
embellishments of the 1890s. Butterfield had effectively retired by about
1890, hence the chancel enrichment was undertaken by others.
William Butterfield (1829-99) is recognised as one of the very greatest C19
church architects. His career flourished from the mid-1840s when he was
taken up by the influential Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society
as one of their favourite architects. He was responsible in the 1850s for
the great church of All Saints, Margaret Street in London, which broke new
ground in terms of Victorian church-building, making use of brick for the
facing and the use of extensive polychromy for the detailing. Butterfield
had an astonishing fertility of invention and his work often has striking
originality, seen for example, in intriguing uses of geometry (as can be
seen with his spire at Enfield) and the bold use of colour. Apart from All
Saints, his best-known work is probably Keble College, Oxford. A devout High
Churchman himself, his clients were usually of similar leanings.
Sunday services are held as follows:
8am - Holy Communion
10am - Parish of Family Communion
6.30pm - Evening Prayer
Active Church: Yes
School on property: No
Date Built: 01/01/1883
Service Times: See the detailed description
Website: [Web Link]
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