"St Nicholas stands among the high-rise offices between the docks and the town centre, in an area that 1960s planners foresaw as the business district of an Ipswich that would eventually be home to half a million people. Fortunately, they were eventually taken away by men in white coats, and the area has been developed with less brutal and lighter office blocks. One of the best is next door to the church, Churchgates House, and it was to here that, in the late 1990s, the Anglican Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich moved its offices.
In the Spring of 2001, the Diocese bought this church for the princely sum of one pound. Having overseen its redundancy barely twenty years earlier, you might think that the Diocese had a bit of a cheek. But, like God, the Anglican Diocese moves in mysterious ways. It was the same month that the Diocese had sold Charsfield vicarage, apparently against the wishes of the Charsfield PCC, for £475,000. To read the Diocese's publication The Church in Suffolk, you wouldn't know that there had been anything at all controversial about these two actions.
If the Churches Conservation Trust had cared for St Nicholas during its redundancy, there would have been an onus on the Diocese to pay the money back that had been spent on St Nicholas during the redundant years. With the IHCT, of course, no such onus existed. You'd expect the Diocese to be slightly embarrassed about this, but no. "I am particularly grateful to the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust for their husbandry of St Nicholas", said Nicholas Edgell, Diocesan Secretary, in the July 2001 edition of The Church in Suffolk. "Without their care and maintenance of the church over the past twenty years, this exciting project would not have been possible". I suppose that he might have meant that, had circumstances been different, the Diocese would not have been able to add it to their property portfolio at such a laughably small price.
Plans were soon unveiled for St Nicholas. It would be converted into a kind of conference centre; the Diocese would use it, but it would also be available for outside users. Most spectacularly, a glass link corridor would be put in place from the east end of the south aisle into Churchgates House itself. However, the church then stood empty and boarded up for a number of years, attracting vandals, especially on the Cromwell Square side which had become a mecca for skateboarders.
Cromwell is not the only famous name associated with this part of Ipswich. Back in the 1470s, it may have been that a butcher whose shop lay opposite the east wall of the churchyard presented his baby for holy baptism at the new church of St Nicholas. It would have been a highly symbolic and moving occasion, as all medieval baptisms were, with the administration of salt and saliva, oil and water, candles and white garments. What would have been the most memorable in later years for those present, though, was that the baby grew up to be Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England.
There's actually no evidence for this, but it is a good story, and one that the Diocese used to promote interest in its bargain purchase. "The new centre we are planning... will make it a new focal point for the Church and Business community in Ipswich", said Nicholas Edgell.
Little remains to show that the Wolseys were ever here. A gateway barely survives at St Peter; it was the watergate entrance to the unfinished college. There is a 1950s plaque on a building in St Nicholas street to show where the shop may or may not have been. The church which they may, or may not, have known, is one of the smallest of the town centre medieval churches, although the tower of 1886 by Edward Bishopp competes well with the towering office blocks that rise on every side. No expense was spared by the Victorians in restoring it to a medieval glory greater than it ever exhibited at the time. Bishopp's finishing touch is a fine statue of St Nicholas sitting in a niche at the top of the western face watching out over the traffic.
The pinnacled top, reminiscent of Suffolk's great cloth churches, reflects boldly from the face of the famous Willis Faber building. The equally famous Unitarian Chapel also looks across the square, although houses filled this gap until the 1970s. There are curious dormer windows halfway along the roof of St Nicholas, which we will come back to in a moment.
Inside, the church was almost entirely Victorianised in 1848. This was a fairly low-brow restoration, before the full flow of the Ecclesiological movement had reached Suffolk. The 17th century pulpit survived, and during the course of the century, attempts were made to enhance this early restoration; when St Lawrence was restored in the 1860s the font there was moved here. But St Nicholas has always been most famous for some Saxon and Norman reliefs, outstanding in a county that has virtually no others of these."
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