Wickham Market

All Saints, Wickham Market

The onset of hypothermia is an unsettling experience. Despite my natural inclination to exaggerate discomfort, the real thing is something I have only experienced twice in my life. Once was in the frozen waste near Leningrad as an impecunious student in the cruel winter of 1985, as the temperature plunged to minus thirty degrees outside of Pavlovsk. The other time was in Wickham Market.

It was the day of the Suffolk Historic Churches bike ride, back in 1998. I'd set off in sunshine from Felixstowe that morning, in high hopes and a Celtic away strip.

By lunchtime, a tremendous thunderstorm had rolled in from the sea, drenching the east of the county. I could have stopped, I suppose, but I was determined to break my record for churches in a single day.

By early afternoon I was so wet, so utterly soaked to the skin, that, like Macbeth with the blood, it was as easy to go on as to turn back.

Sixty three churches after leaving the coast, I arrived in Wickham Market for the sixty fourth, tired, reasonably happy, and very, very wet. I had a quick look in the church and got my form stamped.

I stepped in, triumphant. I am afraid that the kind man who welcomed me mistook my glazed grin for evangelical fervour. I raised my hand in a beatific gesture, and passed inside.

Given that I had just visited 63 other churches, and my camera had run out of film long since, it is not unreasonable that I don't remember a whole lot about it. So it was a delight to return here three years later, on a gentler, fairer day, when the wisdom that comes with old age (well, passing 40, anyway) banished all thoughts of breaking records.

You enter through the west end, although there is also a porch beneath the tower, which stands to the south of the nave. This is quite common in this part of Suffolk, but what is unusual here is that the tower is octagonal, all the way to the ground.

A fish and chip shop customer's eye view of All Saints. Hakewill's frankly acceptable north aisle basks in its sylvan setting. (Photo by Aidan Semmens).

To your right is a pre-Reformation red brick Tudor aisle, built as a chantry chapel to Sir Walter Fulbourne. The wall plates of the beams have figures on them that might once have been angels, but they are vandalised, or restored badly, I'm not sure which.

An absolute delight: the Art Nouveau pulpit, matching the longer view towards the reredos.

Aisle arcade, with distressed wallplate.

Opposite is a 19th century north aisle, which you won't be surprised to learn is the work of Edward Hakewill, who had a thing about north aisles. The view to the east is most attractive in a Lavers, Barraud and Westlake kind of way. There is a restored set of sedilia and piscina in the south wall, and curious chancel aisles, which must have served some purpose.

I adore the sentimental Victorianisation of this church. Above the chancel arch is that quote from the Book of Genesis, more usually found outside over doorways: This is the House of God, and this is the Gate of Heaven. There is something similar at neighbouring Pettistree. Beyond, the reredos is an absolute delight, all gorgeous gilt and Art Nouveau fluidity.

This is the House of God, and this is the Gate of Heaven - those Victorians certainly knew how to use an open church as an act of witness.

Come back into the nave, and take a look at the pulpit, surely by the same workshop as the reredos. I think it the best of its kind in the whole of Suffolk.

I took these photographs, and then headed on in a sensible, sober fashion for Framlingham, Brundish, and the Norfolk borderlands.

Not so three years before. Then, I had phoned my long-suffering and saintly wife, and thrown myself on her mercy. She'd set off in the car from Ipswich immediately - having first rounded up the children, of course, and washed their faces, cooked them a three course meal, lost them again, rounded them up again, watched a series of interminable neo-realist films, and broken the back of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Meanwhile, back at Wickham Market, I was getting colder and colder. And colder. I sat in the bleak market square (where, for your information, a market has not been held for some 400 years). It was getting dark.

I had just 25p in my pocket. This was when the shaking began. My body began to do a kind of shaky dance as I struggled to control it; I started to sweat, and my peripheral vision began to blur.

Walking around the square to keep warm (or, at least, to stave off the onset of unconsciousness) I discovered a fish and chip shop up the lane beside the church. Now, there's not a lot you can buy for 25p these days, but I have no hesitation in saying that the fish and chip shop ensured my survival, by selling me a tub of life-giving, consciousness-raising curry sauce.

This I took around the corner to the local Co-op, Wickham Market's only other open building, the church being long-locked by this time. I drank it while jumping up and down in front of the household goods. Shortly before the shop assistant rang the police to have me arrested, my wife arrived and took me home.

Sunlight shimmers the flints of the west end. Note the bell, which may have come from the sanctus bell turret visible in the adjacent photo. (Photo by Aidan Semmens).

Night must fall. The graveyard is more beautiful than any in an urban setting has a right to be. (Photo by Aidan Semmens).

Since then, I have been profoundly fond of Wickham Market fish and chip shop, while at the same time, of course, avoiding ever going into the Co-op again. If you avail yourself of their excellent services (and I can thoroughly recommend the curry sauce) you'll find on leaving a grand view of All Saints, one of Suffolk's more interestingly shaped churches.

Nobody does it better: turn of the century glamour by Lavers, Barraud and Westlake.

The octagonal tower slenders into a splendid lead spire, with a bell on the west side that is probably not in its original place. Indeed, Mortlock wondered if it had come from the magnificent sanctus bell turret on the east gable end of the nave. The shape of the aisles adds to a sense of clustering, familiar from Rickinghall Inferior. For once, Hakewill did rather a good job.

All Saints, Wickham Market, is located in the centre of the town, which you'll find just off the A12 to the north of Woodbridge. It is open during the day, I understand.

Please note that three of the photos are by Aidan Semmens, and retain his copyright.