Church of St Andrew

St Andrew's Church, Oakington, is the Grade II* listed Church of England parish church of a village a few miles northwest of Cambridge, serving the parish of Oakington and Westwick in the Diocese of Ely. Its oldest fabric, the thick walls of the nave above the arcading and the base of the west tower, dates from the twelfth century, and the building's eight centuries of growth, repair and remembrance are written with unusual completeness into its stones, glass and woodwork. The church was formally dedicated to St Andrew in 1490, and its parish register of baptisms, marriages and burials, beginning in 1561, is virtually complete but for a gap between 1696 and 1708.

The church grew layer by layer. In the thirteenth century it was rebuilt with a narrow south aisle lit by tiny lancets, of which a blocked lancet survives in the aisle's west wall, and a new Early English chancel whose walls contain puddingstones, lit by three lancets a side and a plate-traceried double light of about 1200 over the altar. Curious bricked-up lower windows beneath the lancets nearest the nave on both sides of the chancel may once have allowed lepers to receive holy communion through the wall. In the fourteenth century the tower was heightened, the aisles widened and the chancel arch enlarged; the fifteenth century widened the tower arch, whose hood-mould ends in two carved stone faces that may portray the builders themselves, rebuilt the north aisle with standard Perpendicular windows and a four-centred north doorway, and embattled and buttressed the tower, which carries gargoyles with stone faces below its parapet. The five-bay arcades on each side of the nave appear to have been cut roughly through the original thick Norman wall, the south arcade on renewed thirteenth-century circular columns that still keep traces of their old paint, the north on slightly later octagonal piers; both lean visibly out of plumb from the centuries-long thrust of the nave roof, restrained since 1970 by tie rods. The Victorians renewed roofs, floors and windows in 1843-44 and carried out a major restoration in 1885-89, when the east window was enlarged, and the south porch of 1890 replaced one demolished around 1843. Curved relieving arches at the base of the south aisle wall probably mark a crypt, where tombs were excavated around 1838, and a year later workmen found a thirteenth-century stone coffin half-embedded in the aisle's foundations, its lid carved with a foliated cross and omega ornament; it now lies beneath the war memorial, and two more thirteenth-century coffin lids of the same design, found under the floor in 1850, flank the tower arch.

The interior is a museum of village memory. The font is a square Norman bowl of the twelfth or thirteenth century, carved with round-headed arcading on three sides, raised on five fifteenth-century octagonal pillars, beneath an oak cover whose ironwork was modelled on the long-boats of the invading Danes. Remnants of the fifteenth-century rood screen, with small patches of original red and green paint, stand on either side of the war memorial, a wooden triptych of 1920 by the Warham Guild whose sculpted Crucifixion shelters the names of fifteen Oakington men lost in the First World War, seven more from the Second, and, added in 2012, Andrew Fentiman, an infantryman of the village killed in Afghanistan in 2009, whose grave by the vicarage wall is kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. In the Lady Chapel at the east end of the north aisle, two fifteenth-century Perpendicular image niches with cusped ogee arches and vaulted canopies suggest a former chantry, and the altar frontal of 1988 depicts a springtime Fenland scene designed by a local resident. Behind the organ in the south aisle, an Early English double piscina of the reign of Edward I, moved when the aisle was widened in the fourteenth century, marks what was probably the original Lady Chapel, and a Norman six-lobed flower is carved on the nearest column. A scratch dial, the primitive medieval sundial by which devotions were timed, survives on the chancel's south-east buttress, and a later sundial on the south aisle bears the motto "God always cares".

The chancel keeps the marks of its Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. Its ceiling, first painted in 1902 and re-stencilled by the community in 1986, proclaims "I will magnify Thee O God my King... and I will praise Thy Name for ever and ever," and the oak choir stalls of the same year were given by the same family. The great east window, enlarged in the 1885-89 restoration, holds a charming secret: its four main figures, St Margaret of Antioch with her dragon, St Andrew with his cross, St Etheldreda holding Ely Cathedral, and St Bernard of Clairvaux, were modelled around 1880 on the vicar, the Reverend William George Searle, and his family, Searle himself as St Andrew, his daughter Margaret as Etheldreda, his wife Ermyntrude as Margaret and son Bernard as Bernard. Searle, vicar from 1858 to 1893, was a fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, an antiquary of the Anglo-Saxons and Honorary Curator of Coins at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The two saints flanking the window, Margaret and Bernard, recall the patron: Queens' College, founded by Margaret of Anjou in 1448 as "The Queens' College of Sainte Margarite Virgine and Martyr and of St Bernard Confessor", bought the living in 1557, commemorated in the easternmost lancet bearing the college arms, and remains patron today. Other chancel glass remembers Victorian vicars and parishioners, including a lancet based on Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, and the church plate includes an Elizabethan silver chalice of about 1570 inscribed "For the town of Hockyngton" and a silver paten of 1693 given by the college. An alabaster reredos of the 1880s did not survive the twentieth century: vibration from aircraft at the neighbouring RAF Oakington station during the war of 1939-45 damaged it beyond saving, and oak panelling designed by the church architect Brian Page took its place in 2000, carved at its centre with a pelican.

The tower holds six bells hung low in the structure for stability. Four are ancient: three recorded in 1552 and recast around 1655, two of them by Miles Gray of Colchester whose tenor proclaims "Miles Graie 1655", and one recast in 1748 by Joseph Eayre of St Neots with the motto "Omnia fiant ad gloriam Dei". In 1977-78 local bellringers and friends installed two new Taylor trebles on a steel frame, one inscribed "Non clamor sed amor in aure Dei cantat", "it is not the sound but the love that sings in the ear of God", lowering the old bells from the tower top to keep the structure sound. A glazed oak tower room and ringing gallery, created in 1993, replaced the old practice of ringing from the ground floor on long, unruly ropes. The organ of 1891 by Miller and Son of Cambridge stands at the east end of the south aisle, repainted in 1987, and the parish's twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought electricity in 1948, pew heating from 1966, the Few and Millennium memorial windows of the 1990s and 2000s with roundels by Christopher Fiddes, and in 2009 a new Church Hall by Brian Page at the corner of the churchyard, funded by legacies, congregation and village together to serve the church's ministry and the community's life — the latest layer in a building that has been gathering Oakington's story since the twelfth century.