East Sussex : St Margaret’s, Rottingdean

During a recent visit to Rottingdean to see the windmill, my friend Jill and I also had a brief wander around the historic centre of this pretty little town. 

Jill was particularly keen to see the church after we were told by a local in a coffee shop about its Burne-Jones stained-glass windows.

Dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch, this Grade-II listed, Church of England building dates, in part, from the 13th century but has had many subsequent alterations and restorations. 

It is built of flint, with stone dressings and a tiled roof. 

Perhaps to ensure parishioners are never late for services, it has a big bold clock in the wall above the entrance door.

According to the British Listed Buildings website, all but two of the window designs are by renowned pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, though there is a proviso that the situation may have changed since the original listing, and it did appear that a couple of windows were more modern.

The three windows that immediately catch your eye as you enter St Margaret's Church, those above the altar, are Burne-Jones masterpieces. Designed by him and made by his good friend William Morris, the windows depict the three archangels: from left, Gabriel, the messenger; Michael, the warrior; and Raphael, guardian of children.

These are two more of the stunning windows, which I think were designed by Burne-Jones though, unfortunately, I neglected to take down the details during my visit, and I don’t find the church’s online guide particularly helpful or thorough in its descriptions of the windows.

Following his death in 1898 the ashes of Edward Burne-Jones were buried in the churchyard and memorial plaques to him, and his wife Georgiana, are attached to the exterior of the church, to the south of the main entrance. Burne-Jones lived in North End House, which is just across the village green from the church.

I was intrigued by this rather odd structure, also near the church entrance. The quote, ‘The bird is dead / That we have made so much on’, is from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, act 4 scene 2, where Arviragus enters bearing the seemingly dead Imogen. The memorial, for such it is, is explained in one of the church’s online guidebooks:

Angela Thirkel, society novelist, much loved grand-daughter of Sir Edward Burne-Jones has her memorial also to the left of the West door, a wooden structure needing repair you may think, but this was Angela’s wish that it should ‘rot’ into the ground. The Angela Thirkel Society is still very popular with members who visit St Margaret’s church frequently in her memory. One of her most popular books (repeatedly reprinted) is ‘Three Houses’ a child’s memoir of Rottingdean.

I’m sure there are many other interesting sights to see, gravestones to admire, inscriptions to read in St Margaret’s lovely churchyard but we were on a mission ... that windmill!

Happy National Gutters Day!

On a disused Victorian toilet block

Today is the day to ensure sure your hopper heads are firmly attached to your downpipes and your gutters are clean and unclogged ready for the winter onslaught of rain, sleet and snow.

Guttering is, of course, a very practical invention – buildings do not survive long without the means to rapidly and effectively jettison rainwater – and it was the Romans who first brought the notion of good water management to Britain. They even had a goddess of the sewers, Cloacina (who, not surprisingly I suppose, also protected sexual intercourse in marriage!).

Following their successful invasion of England in 1066, the Normans instigated the construction of huge numbers of castles, manor houses, churches and more, throughout the land, and these buildings, with their stone roofs, towers and turrets, required gutters and gargoyles to throw the water clear of their walls. Though unverified, it is thought that the first downpipe was erected in Britain in 1240, to protect the newly whitewashed walls of the Tower of London. 

The destruction of church buildings that began in 1536 after Henry VIII’s decree for the Dissolution of the Monasteries was, amazingly, a good thing for gutters because large quantities of lead became available. This lead was repurposed and reshaped into hopper heads for use on England’s many great houses, and the hopper heads were decorated with designs and dates, a fashion that continued when the use of cast iron replaced lead in the late 1700s.

Fabulous gargoyle water-throwers on the tower at Llandaff Cathedral

Also at Llandaff Cathedral, hoppers and Kings of England and a jolly Green Man

Cast iron was cheaper and more plentiful than lead so gutters, downpipes and hopper heads became commonplace on smaller houses and the fact that the iron was cast meant it could also be patterned. During the Victorian period, hopper heads became rather ornate, their designs more detailed, and downpipes might have embossed motifs or barley-twist patterns.

Sadly, this fashion died out in the mid 20th century and the gutters of today are very uninspiring, mostly black and frequently plastic, usually plain and angular, with no ornamentation. Fortunately, there are still some craftsmen manufacturing replica guttering for the refurbishment and restoration of historical buildings, and they maintain the old tradition of adding ornamentation and dates to their work. 

This magnificent beast attends to the rain water at Cardiff Castle, as do those pictured below

National Gutters Day does, of course, have a more practical purpose than simply celebrating the gutters of the past. The day came into being in 2002 and was the brainchild of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). It is the finale of National Maintenance Week, ‘an awareness campaign designed to encourage everyone who owns or looks after a building to take a few simple steps at the beginning of winter to ensure that their property is ready for anything that the season can throw at them, especially in these increasingly wet, windy and unpredictable days’.  

On the Cardiff Crown Court and City Hall buildings

On a repurposed church and on a private house (a well-used pigeon perch by the look of it)

It’s an eminently sensible cause. For me, though, today is about paying tribute to the craftsmen who created the wonderful designs to be found on the hopper heads of some of Cardiff’s glorious old buildings and about celebrating the ornate guttering of centuries past. Happy National Gutters Day!

The beautiful creatures above and below guard the gutters on Cardiff University's Trevithick Building

A selection from the King Edward VII Hospital buildings

An appropriate design for this hopper at St Margaret's Church in Roath

My favourite of Cardiff's gutters to date: this magnificent hopper can be found on Cardiff University's Glamorgan Building

St Margaret’s of Roath: dragons and angels and monstrous beasties

Coming as I do from a relatively new country, I sometimes find the antiquity of places in Britain difficult to contemplate. On the site where the Church of St Margaret’s now stands, in the Cardiff suburb of Roath, Christians have been worshipping their God for more than 900 years.

Of course, the current church isn’t that ancient, but a Norman chapel once stood here. According to the church website,  

There was a chapel here – ‘the Chapel of Raht’ – soon after 1100, founded by the Norman Lord Robert Fitzhamon, as a Chapel of Ease to his Priory Church of St Mary in Cardiff. A little whitewashed building, thick-walled and low, served the needs of this ancient hamlet, inhabited since Roman times, and now, for the Normans, the home farm for the castle, its pastures supplying meat, fish, butter and cheese.

St Mary’s and its chapels were given by Fitzhamon to his monastic foundation of Tewkesbury Abbey, which provided clergy, wine and wax to the chapel of Roath until the Reformation, and in return received its tithes. The ghost of a long-dead Benedictine chaplain is said to haunt the church to this day!

The ghost was nowhere to be seen the day I visited, probably put off by the hubbub of the Heritage Weekend Open Day. The church was full of folk enjoying, as I did, the fascinating guided tour that was on offer, as well as parishioners trying to raise funds for the church through sales of jams and various bric-à-brac, and visitors enjoying tea and cake and a gossip about parish goings-on. Genealogists were buzzing about too, as the tombs in the Bute mausoleum were littered with facsimile copies of the parish registers for anyone to check for births, death and marriages.

The original mausoleum had been built in 1800, by the 1st Marquess of Bute for his family, in a building adjacent to the old church. His great-grandson built the current church, in the grand style of Victorian Gothic, between 1870 and 1873, and then a very grand north aisle chapel was added to the new building between 1881 and 1886 as the new mausoleum for the Bute family tombs.

It is an exceedingly ornate resting place, housing seven massive red granite sarcophagi (said to resemble those built for the tsars of Russia), which contain the bodies of John Stuart, the 1st Marquess of Bute, and his two wives, Charlotte Jane Windsor and Frances Coutts, as well as various other members of the Stuart family.

The church itself is not quite as grand as the mausoleum. It was designed by the architect John Pritchard, who specified that a wide variety of coloured bricks and coloured stone were used to decorate the internal walls, in red, blue, white, grey-green and pink. It is an unusual but very effective design.

As in most churches, the stained glass windows are beautiful, filling the interior with rainbow-coloured rays of light. The dates and subjects of St Margaret’s windows vary greatly, from an illustration of the Holy City from the Book of Revelation, dating from 1917, to the Ascension and the four patron saints of St Margaret’s daughter churches depicted above the altar, dating from 1952.

Behind the altar, the Reredos, which dates from 1925 and is by Ninian Comper, depicts the Risen Christ and his 12 Apostles. The central figure is made of alabaster, the others of gilded wood.

Being fascinated by architecture and architectural decoration, I found the exterior of the church almost more interesting than the inside. Take, for example, the carvings beside the original main entrance, which is only used now for weddings and funerals. The church is dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch, who, for those who don’t know the story, had a life-threatening encounter with the devil in the form of a dragon. Being a good Christian girl Margaret bravely confronted the dragon clutching her cross in her hand. The dragon found itself unable to swallow the throat-irritating cross, so Margaret was miraculously saved from death by dragon! This, then, is the reason for the little dragon carvings either side of the doorway.

To my eye, the church is not a pretty building, being rather a jumble of square and rectangular boxes. This impression isn’t helped by the church tower, which is square and squat – Prichard envisaged it would be topped by a spire but, sadly, that never got built. It would perhaps have bestowed a bit more elegance to the building. The current tower was designed by John Coates Carter, as a war memorial, and was only completed in 1926.

The angels high up on the north side and on the north-east corner are lovely adornments, and that corner also boasts a rather unusual conical turret, which doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of the structure but adds visual interest. My favourite architectural decoration can be found towards the tops of both the north and south walls, where there are lines of stone carvings, depicting the heads of various monstrous beasties.

Parts of the boundary wall that surrounds the church date from medieval times and the large, leafy trees look equally ancient. Though the graveyard around the church looks almost empty, it is actually full to capacity but, sadly, most of the headstones were removed in a totally misguided 1969 decision to ‘clean up’ the grounds. Whoever made that decision should be fed to St Margaret’s dragon!