A Walk Around St Mary's Church, Upton

 

 

 

St Mary’s Church, Upton

 

One of the architectural highlights of Slough is St Mary’s Church in Upton, probably as good an example of Victorian Gothic as you’ll ever get. Most of it dates to 1876, and is built of red brick and stone, with details in dark brick and flint, and is highly ornate in keeping with the Gothic revival style. The current building replaced an earlier neo-Norman church built in 1837 that had been outgrown by the local population. The distinctive spire was added in 1912 and is believed to be the last church spire made of stone erected in England; its imposing height has made it into something of a local landmark, although from most angles it is obscured, predictably, by office blocks. 

 

 

Close-up of the tower and spire, St Mary’s Church, Upton

 

The rebuilt tower and spire was completed in 1913 and houses ten bells, eight of which were cast at Whitechapel in the 19^th century; the design is in keeping with the Early English Gothic style of the rest of the building (Thanks, Pevsner). The bells still sound every Sunday morning, although friendly-bombs is rarely up to hear them.

 

 

West windows of St Mary’s Church, Upton

 

John Betjeman visited St Mary’s in the late 60s, and as a connoisseur of church architecture and fan of the High Victorian style would have been doubtless impressed, but it was the celebrated stained-glass windows in the West wing that really excited him. They were designed by the artist Alfred Wolmark and made between 1915 and 1917, to an abstract design of non-symmetrical geometrical shapes; James Elliman Jr, son of the famous local businessman of the same name and the guy who was footing the bill, had said that he “didn’t want any saints, or halos, or anything of that kind”. Pevsner, whose guides were always biased in favour of church architecture anyway, was gushing in his praise, calling the windows “a most remarkable display… a pioneer work of high significance”; Maxwell Fraser’s History of Slough relates that when Betjeman and fellow guide-editor John Piper saw it “they were so impressed by it that they realised they had scarcely done justice to its originality”.

 

If the above picture seems a little underwhelming, it’s because stained glass windows only really work when viewed from the inside; seen from the church interior, and when the light’s right, the windows really are dazzlingly impressive. However, friendly-bombs only enters church in order to vote in useless local elections, so interior shots will have to wait until the next hopeless bunch of candidates comes forward to collectively waste Slough’s time.