All Saints, Leamington Spa
Have you ever asked yourself “what happens if a Victorian priest, with far more money than sense decides to design and build an enormous church, despite having absolutely no architectural qualifications?” Yes? No? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I have the answer here for you, in the constantly-collapsing structure of All Saints Leamington Spa. Prepare for architectural horrors, stones split in two, roof leaks like waterfalls, and beauty beyond measure!
As the name suggests Leamington Spa (or, to give it its full official name “Royal Leamington Spa” is a spa town, and like most spa tows it underwent rapid population growth after the spa was discovered and (more importantly) monetised as a tourist / health and wellbeing attraction. In 1801, before the spring was discovered, 315 people lived there. By 1901 the population was 26,888. At a time when almost everyone went to church, this caused serious problems for the small medieval church, which simply wasn’t big enough.
In 1839 a new priest took up post in Leamington - Rev John Craig. John was a man who came up with many schemes in his time, a giant telescope, a giant artificial ice rink… a giant… church. The point here is that he often spent vast amounts of money making things that were enormous, impractical, and weirdly beautiful. Aside from the church, none remain - so let’s take a look at the church.
Now, when I say that the church is ‘big’, ‘enormous’, ‘giant’ - I really mean it. It’s so big that when it was built the tower of the old church it was replacing was left standing inside, and used to prop up the scaffolding. That’s right, the internal ceiling of the Victorian church stands higher than the tower of the medieval original.
Inside, upon first impression, All Saints is splendid. All height and light and vibrant stained glass.
I deliberately arrived early in the morning so I could catch the way the sunlight from the East casts great shards of colour across the choir stalls,
It is in moments like these where it’s easy to see John Craig’s vision, of a vast church full of beauty and grandeur, reflecting upon earth, a mere fragment of the splendour of God.
This church is indeed vast and beautiful, but it is also a complete mess. Because, as heavily hinted at earlier, John Craig didn’t really know what he was doing. Once you get past the sheer ambition and scale of the building, and start looking more carefully, and thinking more logically, you can't help but wonder what on earth everyone involved in building this church was thinking.
Let's ignore the architecture, for a moment, and go back to basics.
John built his enormous expensive church out of Warwick Sandstone. Warwick Sandstone is soft and porous and altogether the worst stone you could choose - especially when you consider the English weather.
There’s also a quirk which can happen with some sandstones when handled wrong - it’s called “delamination”. To understand this, you must think of sandstone as like puff pastry - comprised of a huge number of thin layers, all squished on top of each other - but instead of pastry the layers are made of ancient sea beds, compressed over time. If a stone is prone to delamination it is disastrous if you place it the wrong way round. This is called “face-bedding”, where the layers end up arranged vertically, with the weight on the edges of the layers, instead of on top. This means that the layers are exposed, and as soon as water gets into the stone those layers flake away, like pastry.
Did the builders of this church regularly place the sandstone the wrong way round? Of COURSE they did.
She’s like a delicious stone croissant, gently flaking away in the rain.
And unfortunately, even the inside of this church is affected by the rain…
There’s also problems of unevenly distributed weight, shifting foundations, and a dozen other things that’d make an architectural surveyor cry. Most notably the church is full of enormous cracks, with solid stones literally splitting in half from the pressure of holding this impossible building up.
For me, the most ominous part of the building was this bulging, splitting, cracking central pier. This literally holds the centre of the church up.
Let’s focus on this specific collection of cracks for a minute, because John Craig had planned a church with a central tower topped by a spire that would make it taller than Salisbury Cathedral, a monument to God, and to beauty.
That tower and spire would have rested on this exact column. Which means that everyone is incredibly lucky that John was unable to finish his giant church, and that what Leamington Spa ended up with instead was… this:
John’s plans were, in all honesty, impossible. His design would never have stood. These beautiful slender central piers flanking the north and south transepts would never have held the weight. As you can see, they barely hold the weight of the strange cube that’s there now.
John died before his grand church was completed, and an architect was brought in to finish the building off - sensibly refusing to even try and put the spire on, and simply capping off where the central tower would have stood, leaving a great flat cube in the middle of the crossing. He added a few extra bays to the west end to finish the church off, stuck a tower on the end, and called it a day.
The horrifying structural issues aside, however, All Saints is objectively beautiful. Impractical. Impossible. But beautiful. John was inspired by French Cathedrals, with enormous transept windows mimicking those on the continent.
When the light comes through in the morning, at just the right angle, the depth of light and shadow they cast prove, to me at least, that sometimes stained glass is superfluous.
And that sometimes plain and stained glass can work in perfect harmony, together.
Though the ceilings in the main body of the church are plain, their warm wooden tones work beautifully with the light carved stone surrounding them, lit up, as it all is, by the sun pouring through enormous clerestory windows.
This theme of light continued throughout my visit. With no artificial lights turned on, the sun did all the work, the light and shade slowly moving across the walls as it rose higher and higher.
Slipping ‘behind the scenes’ into the vestry, the life of the church tumbled out of closets and drawers, sheet music and choir robes everywhere - just as it was in John Craigs time.
A peek into the organ beckoned too…
A quick scramble up the stairs, a glimpse of pipes. But even here, the rain gets in, and destroys the things it touches. Plaster collapses from the walls, bulging and ominous - the dust and water deadly to an instrument like this.
Then back down, for one last look across the building.
Such a grand monument - but to what I cannot quite say… To God? To hope? To hubris?
Perhaps it’s to all three, or to something else entirely. Even so, I’m glad John Craig built this place. And I’m glad he was never able to finish it, because in finishing his design, as he had planned, he’d have destroyed it all in a moment.
I’m glad, too that it hasn’t fallen down… yet. But who knows how long that will be the case…
