Church of Saint Michael and All Angels, Heavitree

The Church of St Michael and All Angels is the principal Church of England parish church of Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter in Devon. The present building is a large and imposing Gothic Revival church of the nineteenth century, but there has been a church on this hilltop since Saxon times, and the site is one of the oldest places of Christian worship in the city. Grade II* listed by Historic England, the church is celebrated for its lofty Victorian tower — a landmark visible across much of Exeter — its remarkable peal of bells, and the ancient "Heavitree Yew" in its churchyard, among the oldest yew trees in the county.

The earliest record of a church here comes in a grant to Exeter Cathedral in 1152, though a church almost certainly stood on the site in the late Saxon era. It was extensively rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its tower followed in 1541, built of the local Heavitree stone — a distinctive red sandstone, quarried in the parish, that gives so many of Exeter's older buildings their warm colour. After that, the records fall silent until the nineteenth century, when the medieval church proved too small for a fast-growing suburban population. Apart from the tower, the old building was pulled down and rebuilt between 1844 and 1846 to the designs of David Mackintosh, a Scottish architect then living in Exeter. The new church — the present one — was raised in grey Devon limestone at a cost of £3,000, largely met by public subscription with a £500 grant from the Church Building Society, and although most of the fabric was new, the old nave piers were thriftily incorporated into the fresh design.

The rebuilding was not without difficulty. Only two years after completion the church had to be closed because the timber floor had rotted, allowing — in the grim phrasing of the time — "noxious vapours from the bodies in the churchyard" to rise into the building; the floor was torn up and replaced with concrete. A shortage of funds also meant that for nearly four decades Mackintosh's new church was joined incongruously to the sixteenth-century tower of its predecessor. Only in the late 1880s did money become available to complete the church with the tower it was always meant to have. Several local architects tendered, and the winning design was by Edward Hall Harbottle; the scheme was conceived to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and Harbottle's tower was completed in 1887 with an inscription at its base commemorating the Jubilee. Remarkably, the tower cost more than the entire rest of the church combined — some £3,155. Harbottle returned in 1893 to enlarge the chancel, a scheme completed in 1898, and the extensive nave galleries with which the church had been built were removed in 1924 when the roof was restored.

The church stands on a steep hill above much of the suburb, its tall tower seen from across the city. Designed in the Gothic Revival style with Perpendicular Gothic influences, it has a six-bay aisled nave, a western tower, north and south transepts and a two-storey chancel, with simple embattled parapets around the aisles; at 821 square metres it ranks as a "large" church in the Church of England's reckoning. In keeping with the Perpendicular style Mackintosh drew upon, the church is filled with large transomed windows — three lights in the nave aisles, four in the transepts, a five-light east window set high near the gable, and a great five-light west window in the lower stages of the tower with intricate tracery above. But the glory of the exterior is that tower. Modelled on the celebrated Gothic towers of Somerset, it rises in four stages, the lower two open to the church, crowned by an elaborate crocketed array of pinnacles reminiscent of Chewton Mendip and Glastonbury; its belfry windows are filled with pierced stone quatrefoil panels in the Somerset manner rather than louvres, and an octagonal stair turret climbs the centre of the north face to a short stone spire above the parapet.

Within, the church is light and lofty, keeping the old Gothic arcade whose lozenge-shaped piers are decorated with angels and shields beneath a fine barrel-vaulted ceiling and whitewashed walls. There is an octagonal font with angels supporting the basin, and a stone pulpit — both from the 1846 rebuilding — carved with the Four Evangelists and St Michael. A decorative screen of marble and alabaster, made in the 1870s and brought from Exeter Cathedral in 1939, shows the Ascension of Christ with the twelve apostles at its centre, flanked by the Transfiguration and the descent of the Holy Spirit. The organ in the north transept is a significant historic instrument, built in 1896 by Hele & Co of Saltash, overhauled by the same firm in 1926, converted to electric action by John Compton in 1955, and enlarged in 1978 and 1990 to its present three manuals and forty-two speaking stops.

The bells of Heavitree are among the finest in Devon. Before the tower of 1887 the church had a ring of four — one medieval bell and three cast by the Pennington foundry in 1667, one of them recast in 1869 after it cracked. These were taken down and recast, with additional metal, into the present ring of eight by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough in 1897; sixteen bell foundries had tendered for the work, which cost £825 17s 5d, and the new octave was given by the parishioners to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, first dedicated on Christmas Eve 1897 by the Bishop of Crediton. With a tenor weighing some twenty-five and three-quarter hundredweight — over 1,300 kilograms — they form one of the heaviest rings in the county, second in Exeter only to the cathedral, and they are reckoned among the finest in the country, helped by the excellent acoustics of a tower designed specifically to hold a peal of change-ringing bells. More than a hundred full peals have been rung on them since the first in 1898, and they are popular with visiting bands. So fine are they that the bells and their cast-iron frame are listed for preservation as "an exemplary example of the founders' work" — one of only six rings of eight or more by John Taylor & Co in the country to be so listed.

From a Saxon foundation recorded in a cathedral grant of 1152, through a red-sandstone medieval church and a Victorian rebuilding in grey limestone, to a Somerset-inspired Jubilee tower hung with one of the West Country's great peals, St Michael and All Angels gathers eight centuries of Devon church-building into one hilltop landmark. It remains the busy parish church of Heavitree, its ancient yew still standing in the churchyard, its bells still ringing out over Exeter.