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Sheltering at the end of a
little lane off of the busy Ipswich to
Debenham road, Winston is a pretty little
hamlet where, reassuringly, not much
happens. It is curious to idly ponder
that if Debenham had suffered the 19th
century industrialisation of, say,
Stowmarket, the town would have reached
out and engulfed this little settlement,
church and all, and we would now be
standing among modern semis, or perhaps
beside a distribution warehouse. But the
railways did not reach Debenham, and so
Debenham did not reach Winston. The
church sits in a churchyard which always
seems to be filled with birdsong whenever
I visit. St Andrew is by no means a
church of outstanding significance, but
there is a pleasure in the way time seems
not to have moved on a great deal since
the late 19th Century. This was when the
chancel was rebuilt by the major Arts and
Crafts-influenced architect WC Caroe,
most notable in Suffolk for his work
across the county at Elveden.
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Caroe's work here is at
first rather depressingly conventional, but
because of this the east window comes as a
surprise, because it is a small, high opening in
the early-16th Century style, the kind of thing
which would become very fashionable in the first
three decades of the 20th Century. Mortlock
suggests that Caroe was replacing a window from
Diocesan Architect Richard Phipson's earlier
restoration of the 1860s, which had proved too
large for the building to be stable on this soft
ground, but it may just be that Winston's east
window is a pioneer of this revivalist style. The
pretty red-brick crow-stepped south porch is
genuine early-16th Century, and appears sumpteous
against the grey-rendered nave, although there is
also a considerable amount of red brick in the
corners of the tower above it.
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of simplicity. Everything seems
understated. There is a plain octagonal
font, and a set of royal arms for George
III out of which all the colours seem to
have been bleached. The Victorian benches
still have their numbers on, and there
are six uninspiring Continental glass
panels depicting Apostles set into the
nave and chancel windows. At the west
end, the angled tower arch is a
curiosity, being picked out in red brick.
The ghost of an earlier arch is
discernible above it. Perhaps
the nicest touch here is the decorative
grill to the east window, topped by
barleycorns. Below it, the tiny altar was
draped in red, which I thought might
possibly be in preparation for the
penitential season of Lent, due to begin
in four days time. But it might just have
been there to keep the bats' mess off.
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Simon Knott, March 2009
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