Church of St Lawrence

St Lawrence's Church is a Grade II listed church in Ecchinswell, Hampshire, serving the villages of Ecchinswell, Bishop's Green and Sydmonton in the rural deanery of Whitchurch within the Diocese of Winchester. Designed by Bodley & Garner in 1885–87 — at the very time the young Ninian Comper was their articled pupil — it seats 200 and stands among the finest small Victorian churches in north Hampshire, its long, thin parishes stretching from the River Enborne and the county boundary in the north to the Port Way, the Roman road from Silchester to Old Sarum, in the south.

The new church replaced an ancient predecessor of the same dedication, which William White described in 1852 as "a small ancient fabric, without tower, situated in low swampy ground". The foundation stone was laid on a more convenient site on 10 August 1885 by Mrs Kingsmill — Constance Mary Portal, wife of William Howley Kingsmill of Sydmonton Court — and the new St Lawrence's, "dedicated like the ancient fabric to Saint Lawrence", was consecrated by Harold Browne, Lord Bishop of Winchester, on Friday 15 October 1886, at a cost of £5,000. The consecration gathered notable churchmen: Canon George Raymond Portal, rural dean and uncle of Mrs Kingsmill, read the Epistle, while the Gospel and sermon fell to Archdeacon George Sumner of Winchester — husband of the founder of the Mothers' Union and son of a previous Bishop of Winchester — who preached on Revelation 21:22: "And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it."

The church is built of knapped flint with Bath stone dressings. The south-west porch-tower carries a weatherboarded belfry with a steep pyramidal shingled spire, an ashlar-faced projection at the west end housing the bell-chamber stairs. Inside, nave and chancel run as one, with undecorated chancel stalls and aisles, a two-seater stone sedilia, and — instead of a chancel arch — a magnificent open screen combined with the rood beam, one of Bodley & Garner's most beautiful effects. Above the altar and part of the chancel is a ceilure painted in red and green; the east window is set high to allow for a reredos, now missing, and high on the chancel's eastern wall survive parts of a fabric wall covering by Bodley & Garner, executed by Watts & Co — the famous church furnishers Bodley co-founded. The spired font cover, also Bodley & Garner, is dated 1893. Of the two ogee-topped openings between nave and aisles, the northern has been blocked. The organ, by Bevington & Sons of London (1887, £230), sits in a Bodley & Garner case inscribed "Alleluia Gloria Tibi Jesu Rex aetna Gloriae"; its arrival in May 1887 was celebrated with "special services of a bright and hearty character", the Dean of Winchester, Dr Kitchen, preaching at the 3pm Benediction.

The stained glass is by Burlison and Grylls — the firm founded in 1868 at the instigation of Bodley & Garner themselves. The east window is dated 1886, placed by Major-General Edward Coysgarne Sim of the Royal Engineers and his wife Alice Frances Howley Sim in memory of her parents William Kingsmill (died 1865) and Anne Jane his wife — a daughter of Archbishop Howley of Canterbury — and of their son Arthur Coysgarne Sim, a Royal Navy midshipman who died in 1894 aged just eighteen. The west window of 1933, showing St Nicholas and St Christopher, commemorates William Howley Kingsmill (1838–1894) of Sydmonton Court, given by his widow and children; the Grade II listed lychgate by Bodley & Garner had already been added in his honour in 1895. Later glass includes a Ploughman of 1984 by Francis Skeat for Dick Woodridge of Park Farm, Sydmonton, and a south aisle window of St Anne in memory of Anne Hill, organist of the parish for fifty-two years, who died in 1930. Stone inscriptions remember Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew de Portal Kingsmill DSO OBE MC of North Sydmonton House and his wife Gertrude, and — on the south wall, with the words "cantate domino canticum novum" — the singer and writer Lionel Portman of Swaites House.

One memorial connects the parish to English literature. In the old vestry behind the organ is a marble scroll to "John Digweed, Esquire, of this place", who died in February 1843 aged seventy-six. Digweed of Ecchinswell House was interred inside the old church, and his horizontal gravestone — now in the open air — is all that remains above ground to mark where the original St Laurence's stood; his nephew, Lieutenant-Colonel William Henry Digweed, donated the holy acre for the new church. The Digweeds were the family who rented the manor and great farm at Steventon — and so grew up with, and were friends of, Jane Austen.

The chapelry of Ecchinswell and Sydmonton was separated from St Mary's, Kingsclere in 1852; a vicarage followed in 1853 — the year the sister church of St Mary, Sydmonton was rebuilt — and a school in 1861, built for William Kingsmill. In 1979 the parish was joined with Burghclere with Newtown in a combined benefice, and St Mary, Sydmonton closed around 1980. The incumbents have run from the Reverend Wilfrid Anderson Boyce through Canon Anthony Jardine (1973–1987) and the long ministry of David Bartholomew (1998–2020) to the Reverend Anthony Smith, appointed in 2020. The tower's ring was transformed in 2022, when the three bells of 1886 and 1912 by John Warner & Sons were replaced by six lighter bells — by Mears & Stainbank, Gillett & Co, Gillett & Johnston and the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, dating from 1871 to 1963 — tuned to B, A, G, F sharp, E and D: a new voice for Bodley's flint church beneath the Watership Down hills.