Visiting St Mary’s Church Wimbledon
A few minutes walk from Wimbledon’s famous tennis courts is a 180-year-old church that sits on a spot that has been a church since at least the 12th century and may have been in the Domesday Book.
The current church, with its tall stone tower, dates from 1843 and is at least the fourth church on the site. The first medieval church was replaced in the late 13th century and, in turn, replaced in 1786. That Georgian-era church didn’t last very long, though, as the countryside was urbanising. In 1843, the current church, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, replaced it.
Scott was given the brief of building the church without exceeding a strict budget of £4000, which he succeeded in doing by incorporating parts of the earlier building. It is still possible to see these older parts today. Another visibly notable addition was the tower and spire, which is 196 feet tall.
The beams in the chancel roof were rediscovered during renovation work in 1860 and are thought to be Medieval in origin. They are decorated with a chevron and flower pattern and were restored in 1993 as part of the church’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
Something interesting off to one side was the Tudor-style ceiling painting in a small side room that looks like it once housed the church font – as there’s a font-sized mark on the floor tiles. Now, it’s a small library space.
A tile on the wall tells us that two of the bells in the tower date to the reigns of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. And, notable is that Queen Elizabeth doesn’t have a number, which indicates that the sign predates QEII. The sign says that a third bell was added during the reign of King George I, three more for Queen Victoria and two more in memory of two parishioners.
I suspect I may have visited on a day when a festival was being prepared as some lovely flowers were on the ends of some of the pews.
Outside, in the churchyard, which has quite a few decent graves, is also the mausoleum to London’s sewer king, Sir Joseph William Bazalgette.
It also looks rather pretty from a distance.
The Bazelgette mausoleum was actually built for someone else, who had no descendents, and was purchased by BazAelgette.
The Bazalgette surname appears a few times on monuments/boards inside the Church. Sir Joseph William and family lived nearby in a house, long demolished, in Arthur Road.
Eleanor Bairstow, my grandmother, is buried in the church graveyard. She was the wife of Sir Leonard Bairstow who was the first person to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth 2nd in 1953. They lived at Arden Gare, 10, Home Park Road. Sadly she died before I was born in 1948.