All Saints, Sproughton

home index e-mail what's new?

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk

Thanks to local planning policies, the River Gipping still winds through gentle water meadows before diving into the industrial wastelands of west Ipswich. In these meadows, Bramford and Sproughton still feel like proper villages.You can see at once from the map that both are really part of the greater Ipswich urban area, but if you point this out to me I will tell you to put your map away. The river, a field and the A12 dual carriageway still separate Sproughton from the hellish Boss Hall industrial estate, which is just as it should be. Curiously, the medieval parish of Sproughton has undergone one of the largest population increases of any in Suffolk. In the mid-19th century, it numbered hundreds; today, it is more than 30,000. However, these people were long since taken out of the parish, and added to the Borough of Ipswich. Most of them live on Ipswich's challenging Chantry Estate, named for being the former farmlands of Sproughton Chantry Hall, which survives, but is also now in the Borough, a Sue Ryder home in a public park. The lands themselves, of course, were originally chantry lands, providing income for paying chantry priests in this very church.

As at Bramford, All Saints sits beside the river, and across the road is a delightful old mill pond, with its restored water mill. Arthur Mee found this working in the 1930s. The main village street can be a bit of a traffic bottle neck, but this is a pleasant enough place.

All Saints is a largely 14th century building, although the east end is wholly Victorianised. The restoration was, perhaps surprisingly, at the hands of Frederick Barnes, a decent but somewhat unorthodox local architect best known for his railway stations on the Ipswich to Cambridge line. The clerestory and aisles give a sense of a comfortable, medieval Catholic liturgical space at ease with itself, before the excesses of Perpendicular set in. Stepping inside, the first impression is that the Victorians were lavish in their attention here, and this is in fact one of the best 19th Century restorations in the Ipswich area for those of us who like that kind of thing, which I do. Here, fresh from his work at All Saints Margaret Street in London, Alexander Gibbs gave it the largest number of his windows to be found in any church in East Anglia. From half a century later comes the terrific Christopher Whall window depicting St Christopher and the legend of Longinus in the north aisle. Whall died during its making, and it was completed by his daughter Veronica. If this church is a beautiful shell, then the Whall window is undoubtedly the pearl.

Several hundred years before Whall, Elizabeth Bull was buried here. The year was 1634, and she was certainly a Cromwellian puritan, but much of her life had been lived as a Tudor. She wears her ruff, and kneels as angels draw curtains in front of her. And then there is the other stained glass, mostly by the great Alexander Gibbs, including a startlingly fine Works of Mercy and an unusual Good Samaritan, but some by other workshops including WG Taylor and Ward & Hughes. And perhaps the best of the 1860s restoration is the wood carving of the great Henry Ringham, an Ipswich craftsman who is now recognised as one of the great carvers of the century. But overwhelmingly, there is an urban feel to the interior, as if the 19th century restorers were already anticipating the creeping of Ipswich towards this church, across the water meadows. Perhaps they would be surprised to find that it still has not made it this far.

Simon Knott, 1999, 2007, updated May 2016

Amazon commission helps cover the running costs of this site