All Saints Church, Leicester

All Saints' Church is a redundant Anglican church on High Cross Street in Leicester — a Grade I listed building in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, and one of the oldest Christian sites in a city whose recorded churches go back to the Domesday Book. Though it now stands away from the modern city centre, isolated by the road system of the 1960s, when it was built it stood at the very heart of Leicester, beside the old High Cross from which its street takes its name.

The Domesday Book records that Leicester had six churches, and All Saints is assumed to have been one of them. In 1143 it was given to Leicester Abbey, the great Augustinian house north of the town. The church was enlarged around 1300, when the aisles were added, and during the following century the tower and nave were raised and new aisle roofs built. Like many medieval town churches it served secular as well as sacred purposes — and two episodes stand out. In 1418, Margery Kempe — the mystic and author of the first autobiography in English — was tried in this church for Lollardy, accused of following the teachings of John Wycliffe. And in 1583, during outbreaks of plague, the assizes themselves were held in the church, justice fleeing the pestilent streets for consecrated ground.

As the centuries passed, Leicester's population and businesses drifted away from the old quarter, and All Saints' parish combined with other local parishes. By the early nineteenth century the fabric was deteriorating: the chancel was demolished and rebuilt in brick in 1829, the local architect Henry Goddard added new seating and extended the gallery in 1843 and restored the roofs in 1855–56, and in 1874–76 Joseph Goddard and Alfred Paget undertook a fuller restoration, adding new windows, building a new nave roof and removing the gallery. William Basset-Smith restored the tower in 1894–95. The twentieth century was less kind: the new road system of the 1960s cut the church off from the city, the chancel was partitioned from the rest of the building to form a meeting room, and attendance continued to decline. The church closed in 1982, was declared redundant on 1 January 1983, served for a time as a store, and was vested in the Churches Conservation Trust on 8 July 1986. It suffered a fire in 2020 — the latest trial in a long survival.

The building rewards close attention. The chancel is brick, the rest stone, the roofs slate; the plan comprises a six-bay clerestoried nave with north and south aisles under three parallel roofs, a four-bay chancel set lower, and a north-east tower. The west doorway is Norman — a round arch decorated with chevrons — while the rest of the church is in the Geometrical and Decorated styles, with a five-light west window to the nave, four-light windows ending the aisles, three-light windows along aisles and clerestories, and a Perpendicular three-light east window. The tower rises in three stages, its lowest stage keeping twelfth-century angle pilasters of unusual semicircular cross-section and a thirteenth-century pointed west doorway, with diagonal buttresses above, two-light transomed and louvred bell openings, and an embattled parapet.

The church's most charming feature hangs above the south doorway: a clock of about 1620 in an early seventeenth-century gabled wooden bellcote, with two mechanical jack figures to strike the hours and a nineteenth-century image of Father Time bearing the inscription "Tempus edax rerum" — time, devourer of all things. Remarkably, the clock has faces on both the exterior and the interior of the church. Over the north doorway is a quatrefoil rose window.

Inside, six-bay arcades ride on octagonal piers, the chancel arch now blocked. The nave floor is itself a palimpsest — medieval tiles, grave slabs, parquet beneath the pews, and twentieth-century concrete elsewhere. The south aisle holds a tomb recess and two piscinae; the richly carved font is thirteenth-century, and the polygonal pulpit fifteenth-century on a nineteenth-century base. The tower's west window contains medieval stained glass, while the other glass is of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including work by Heaton, Butler and Bayne and by Clayton and Bell, along with a war memorial window by Morris & Co. Wall monuments ring the church, and in the churchyard stands the table tomb of Gabriel Newton, the local politician and founder of Leicester's Bluecoat School, who died in 1762 — his name still carried by Leicester institutions today.

No longer needed for regular worship, All Saints' remains consecrated and conserved — a Domesday church where a medieval mystic stood trial and Father Time still keeps the hours over High Cross Street, in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust for the generations to come.