Independent meeting house, built 1727. Red brick with distinctive paired Dutch gables, and pantile roof; interior with original eighteenth-century gallery with its box pews, other late nineteenth-century pews and pulpit. A charming survival of a modest, rural dissenting chapel on a ‘domestic’ scale. Maintained by Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust.
St Michael the Archangel, Booton
A remarkable, eccentric late Victorian church. The medieval church was rebuilt by the Reverend Whitwell Elwin (a descendent of Pocahontas) between 1876 and 1900, drawing on elements copied from gothic churches across the country. The slender, diagonally-set twin west towers soar upwards cross the wide East Anglian landscape framing a central ‘oriental’ minaret; pinnacles surmount the buttresses and inside, dramatic wooden angels hold up the roof (carved by James Minns, a well-known master carver). “You may love the church; you may be outraged by it, but you cannot remain unmoved by such an exuberant oddity.” Maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust.
St Mary and St Michael, Reepham
St Mary Reepham and St Michael
St Mary
Reepham is well-known in Norfolk for having three churches in its one churchyard; All Saints Hackford was destroyed in c.1540; St Mary Reepham and St Michael Whitwell remain. Both are fine medieval parish churches, with many post-medieval fixtures and monuments. Reepham itself is an attractive market town with many fine, mainly eighteenth-century, buildings.
St Mary's, Bylaugh
St Mary’s is a pretty, well preserved ‘estate church’ almost wholly rebuilt by the local squire Sir John Lombe in 1809-1810. The exterior of this church is a strange mix of the original medieval fabric, and nineteenth century additions and rebuilding (the shallow transepts and octagonal turrets contrasting with the projecting classical cornice and brackets). Inside, however, is a perfect survival of a pre-Ecclesiological church interior, with box pews, three-decker pulpit and heated squire’s pew, all fitted out for the small community of a single great estate.
