Church of St. John the Baptist, Cirencester

The Church of St John Baptist dominates the Market Place of Cirencester, Gloucestershire — a Grade I listed building of golden Cotswold stone that ranks among the largest parish churches in England, 180 feet long, 104 feet wide, its three-stage buttressed tower rising 134 feet over the old Roman town. It is the supreme example of a Cotswold "wool church", renowned for its great Perpendicular porch, its fan vaults and its merchants' tombs, and its fabric records every architectural style since the twelfth century.

The church is medieval to its bones, begun in the twelfth century on the site of an earlier Saxon church. The chancel is the oldest part, widened in about 1180, and the east window dates from around 1300 — its original stained glass long since vanished, the opening now filled with fifteenth-century glass gathered from other parts of the church. To the north of the chancel lies St Catherine's Chapel of about 1150, which keeps a wall painting of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child and exquisite vaulting given by Abbot John Hakebourne in 1508, when major reconstruction was funded by the wool trade at its zenith. North again is the Lady Chapel, first built in 1240 and extended in the fifteenth century. The nave was completely rebuilt around 1240, and the Trinity Chapel of 1430–1460 was endowed for a priest of the neighbouring abbey to say masses for the souls of kings and queens; it retains a squint — a sight-line cut through the masonry — that allowed the priest to synchronise his celebration of mass with the high altar. The tower went up around 1400, shored by the enormous buttresses at its junction with the nave that remain one of the church's most striking features, and its bells have been added to and recast over the centuries, mostly by Rudhall of Gloucester. Finally, between 1515 and 1530, the nave was rebuilt once more into the remarkable late Perpendicular space seen today, its arcades of tall piers crowned with carved angels supporting the arches and clerestory windows.

The great three-storey south porch facing the Market Place is the church's signature — and it was not originally part of the church at all. Built around 1480 by Cirencester Abbey as an administrative centre, at the expense of Alice Avening, it is elaborately decorated with carved oriel windows and crenellated parapets topped by pinnacles, its interior chambers a profusion of panelling. Between the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the eighteenth century, when it was finally connected to the church, it served as Cirencester's town hall — a unique double life for what is often called the grandest church porch in England.

History has passed vividly through the building. In 1642, after skirmishes in the town during the English Civil War, the church was used to imprison local citizens overnight. In the 1860s George Gilbert Scott led a Victorian restoration to strengthen the structure, moving many of the bodies interred beneath the nave to the Lady Chapel — a relocation that lowered the floor and created sub-floor voids, which were investigated during alterations in 2008 and 2009 and yielded evidence of the church's many building periods. In 2019 a design competition was launched to commission new statues for the niches on the church wall, replacing those removed and lost in 1963.

The fittings are worthy of the architecture. The pulpit is fifteenth-century — a rare pre-Reformation survival still in use — and the octagonal font, carved in the fourteenth century, was rediscovered in the abbey grounds and returned to the church in the nineteenth. The brass chandeliers were made in Bristol in 1701. The stained glass includes fragments of medieval work amid largely eighteenth-century and Hardman & Co. glazing, and fragments of medieval wall painting survive, particularly in St Catherine's Chapel, alongside a wide variety of tombs and monuments to the wool merchants whose fortunes built the church. Its most celebrated treasure is the silver-gilt "Boleyn Cup", made in 1535 for Anne Boleyn and given to the church by her daughter, Elizabeth I. The organ is a Father Willis instrument of 1895 in a case by George Gilbert Scott, renovated by Rushworth and Dreaper in 1955 and rebuilt by Harrison & Harrison in 2009.

Today St John Baptist is an active Church of England parish church at the head of a combined parish that includes Holy Trinity, Watermoor, and St Lawrence, Chesterton — still the spiritual centre of the Cotswolds' capital, as it has been since the wool merchants of the fifteenth century raised the most magnificent parish church their golden fleeces could buy.