St Mary's Church, Sunbury. S. S. Teulon. 1856. Surrey. Photograph taken by Phil Beauchamp, who also very kindly provided the information about post-Pevsner changes to the interior. Text by Jacqueline Banerjee.
St. Mary's Church, Sunbury, stands in a lovely spot beside the River Thames in what is now administratively a part of Surrey. Nikolaus Pevsner says that here Teulon descended on a previously "guileless building and recast it vigorously." He claims that "the effects of his steamroller sensitivity are here particularly revolting: a heavy chancel with round-headed windows, multi-coloured brick decoration everywhere, even, to add 'interest,' to the tower. A gloomy, depressing interior with iron-ornamented gallery" and so on (470). Unfortunately, Pevsner visited in 1969 when the church was in disuse, just a few years prior to its restoration in 1972. The interior was opened up after that by moving the choir stalls out of the chancel, for example (the eastern part of the iron-ornamented gallery had already been removed by then). All this shows Teulon's work off to better advantage now. Moreover, taste has changed in recent years, so that the "rogue architects" of the mid-Victorian period are now better appreciated, as J. Mordaunt Crook's introduction to Eastlake's History of the Gothic Revival makes plain. What Crook calls "architectural eccentricity" is no longer looked at askance (<14>). Amongst the finer points of the unusual interior are the sgraffito murals in the chancel, which according to Pevsner date from 1892 (470).
The church (in its "guileless" pre-Teulon state) has a literary association. One cold, dark, misty evening, Bill Sikes trundles past here in a cart with Oliver Twist, on the way to the failed robbery at Chertsey: "As they passed Sunbury Church, the clock struck seven. There was a light in the ferry-house window opposite: which streamed across the road, and threw into more sombre shadows a dark yew-tree with graves beneath it" (Ch. 21). Dickens would have passed this way often on his rides down the river while staying in Richmond, not only to make observations for his novel, but also to visit friends in both Esher (where the literary couple William and Mary Howitt once lived) and Chertsey (home of the theatrical entrepreneur Albert Smith).
Other Views
- View of Interior
- Interior (2), showing the iron-ornamented gallery
- The sgraffito Annunciation by Heywood Sumner, in St Mary's Church, Sunbury
- The sgraffito Epiphany by Heywood Sumner, in St Mary's Church
Sources
Crook, Mordaunt J. Introduction. A History of the Gothic Revival. By Charles Locke Eastlake. Reissued by Leicester University Press, 1970. <13>-<57>.
Nairn, Ian and Nikolaus Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Buildings of England: Surrey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd ed. 1971.
Last modified 2 April 2009