The loveliest church of the 19th century
I’ve been to Dublin and to Lublin, to Guadalcanal and Canaveral, but I’d never been to Watford. I’d often passed through, on the train, but never got off. Yet in Watford is “the most lovely church the 19th century gave to England”, as the new volume for Hertfordshire of Pevsner’s architectural guides says, quoting H S Goodhartrendel. So I went to see.
Watford architecturally is not so much a town as a tragedy. In the high street, the occasional pitched roof of old tile only goes to emphasise the general catastrophe. In 1950, there were 121 buildings of historic interest; in 1975, 40, and since then 13 have been demolished.
Instead of looking to the river Colne, Watford town centre is an island girt by a ring-road. Half that island is now occupied by a hideous shopping centre called Intu.
In an oasis of tranquillity behind the high street stands Mrs Elizabeth Fuller’s Free School, dated 1704, a beautiful brick building with arched windows, opposite the medieval flint parish church (closed for multi-million upgrading to desacralise the interior). Three minutes away, at the end of Market Street, perilously close to the trafficky Exchange Road, is our goal, the church of the Holy Rood (or cross).
It, too, is of local flints, cut to show their dark, glassy insides. There is a tower 117ft high and two turrets housing stairs within. The neatness and variety of the whole is clever. It occupies a square site, right on to the pavement on two sides, with the corner made busy with the gable of a side-chapel.
Inside it becomes clear why James Bettley, the editor of the new volume (following his much-praised volumes on Suffolk), retains the judgment on the church as “one of the noblest examples of the refined, knowledgeable and sensitive Gothic revival of that time”. That time was the 1890s and the architect was JF Bentley, who designed Westminster Cathedral in a completely different Byzantine idiom.
The immediately striking feature of the interior of the Holy Rood is the redpainted rood loft across the nave. Below, sight of the altar is unobstructed by any screen. Above, a great crucifix stands, flanked in the traditional manner by the figures of the Virgin Mary and St John, on organic-looking supports like beech boughs.
I sat at the back as 40 worshippers ended noon Mass with Whittier’s Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. I began to notice details. Although the church has a normal cross-shaped plan (with a transept on each side forming the arms of the cross), the arches each side of the nave march on past the openings of the transepts. This leaves the nave unified visually. Each side of the chancel are narrow ambulatories, above which run wall-passages that add to the interest of the light flooding in from north, south and east windows.
The fittings are not gaudy but well-designed and made, the whole enterprise financed by ST Holland of the building firm for which Bentley had worked as a draughtsman in the 1850s. Bentley’s hand can be seen everywhere, from the encaustic floor tiles to the wrought-iron grilles like woven rushes over heating vents in the floor. There is ballflower moulding on archways and a flamboyant ogee with headstops above the holy-water stoup. The pierced gilt-bronze electric light pendants date from 1899.
Holland’s chantry is in the chapel of the Holy Ghost. Above the south door a plaque bears a relief portrait of Bentley, who died in 1902, with an inscription asking for prayers for this man, “to whose genius and devotion the beauty of this church is due”.