All Saints' Church, Hockerill

All Saints' Church, Hockerill, rises over the east side of Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire — a Grade II listed church remarkable as the first ever designed by Stephen Dykes Bower, the great twentieth-century Gothic Revival architect, and in one informed opinion his best, born from the ashes of a Victorian church destroyed in a fire that made national news.

For centuries Bishop's Stortford was a single parish, until swelling congregations led the vicar of St Michael's, Francis William Rhodes — father of the magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes — to divide it into three. The first All Saints', Hockerill, was built in 1851 to the designs of the local architect George Pritchett and consecrated on 7 January 1852: a Commissioners' church, paid for with money voted by Parliament, its new parish created and assigned by Queen Victoria on 2 February 1852. The first vicar, John Menet, was simultaneously the first chaplain of the neighbouring Diocesan Training College for Schoolmistresses, founded the same year and now succeeded by Hockerill Anglo-European College.

That first church perished on Friday 21 June 1935, when fire gutted the building. Villagers tried to fight the flames but retreated when they reached the roof, which collapsed within half an hour; the vicar, Reginald J. Mockridge, and parishioners managed to rescue the Communion plate, the parish records and the lectern, while firemen — hampered by a lack of water and smoke so dense they had to wear gas masks — could do little. The response was extraordinary: funds for a new church were being collected the very day of the fire. The rebuilding eventually cost £27,178 — roughly £1.4 million today — of which £9,528 was raised publicly, partly through an auction to which Queen Mary gave a pair of vases, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) gave a parchment blotter and a picture of Princess Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth II, and film stars contributed autographed photographs. The foundation stone was laid on 20 July 1936 and the new church consecrated on 24 July 1937.

The commission launched Dykes Bower's lifelong work on churches in the Gothic Revival style, and All Saints' shows his gifts already mature: a traditional plan and artistic coherence combined with a freedom from stylistic convention that sets it apart from most churches of its era. The west front dominates its side of the town with a tall, broad central tower under a distinctive steep saddleback roof and three impressively tall lancets, the Kentish ragstone facings and flanking buttresses lending a monumental effect. His brief required him to use the remains of the old church — a strategy he repeated when rebuilding the fire-destroyed St John the Evangelist at Newbury — and at the south-west entrance the nineteenth-century timber lych gate survives as the only part of the 1851 church untouched by the fire.

Inside, a narthex at the base of the tower contains the baptistery, set in a direct line with the high altar; beyond, nave and flanking aisles lead to a long aisle-less chancel. The interior is simple but noble, bright and airy, its forty-five-foot nave height accentuated by giant drum piers carrying Gothic pointed arches beneath a coffered wagon roof — qualities Dykes Bower later echoed in the Church of the Holy Spirit at Southsea and in his chancel and transepts at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, whose oriel window is foreshadowed by the oriel at All Saints'. Within the Gothic shell, the furnishings are Classical, including the four classical pillars surrounding the high altar.

The focal point is the great east rose window above the high altar: eighteen feet across, with flowing cusped tracery, designed by Hugh Ray Easton. Against the plain walls and stone, its intricate geometry and rich, deep colours supply the building's principal blaze of colour; the central roundel shows Christ in Majesty, ringed by lights bearing the emblems of the Evangelists and apostles and the heraldry of dioceses associated with the parish. The design — Rayonnant in style, with pointed-arched mullions radiating from the central roundel — resembles Dykes Bower's rose window at Lancing College Chapel. On the north wall of the chancel, in an elevated case designed by Dykes Bower with the sixteen-foot Open Diapason pipes on display, stands the two-manual organ built in 1937 by Henry Willis II of Henry Willis & Sons, perfectly placed to exploit the building's excellent acoustic.

All Saints' today stands in the Affirming Catholicism tradition of the Church of England while catering for other traditions, with eight regular services of varying styles, a robed choir every Sunday, a children's choir at the All-Age Mass, a Sunday school, youth group, film club, Mothers' Union, home groups and teams of pastoral visitors, servers, readers and flower arrangers. Linked to All Saints' Church of England Primary School and Nursery, and a popular concert venue for its acoustics, the church is usually open daily from 9am to 6pm — Dykes Bower's first church, still doing everything a parish church is for.