Church of St Mary and All Saints, Chesterfield

The Church of St Mary and All Saints, the great parish church of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, is one of the most famous and instantly recognisable churches in England — for it is crowned by the celebrated "Crooked Spire", a steeple that both twists and leans, dominating the skyline of the town and drawing visitors from around the world. The largest parish church in the Diocese of Derby, and a Grade I listed building of largely medieval date, St Mary's is a fine and ancient church in its own right, but it is the extraordinary spire that has made it a landmark and a legend.

Christian worship on the site is very old. A font in the south transept is thought to date from between 890 and 1050, and there is a record of a "Church in Chesterfield" during the reign of Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, while historians believe there was also a Norman church here. Construction of the present church began in 1234, and it was continued and greatly expanded throughout the medieval period, especially in the fourteenth century, from which the bulk of the building dates. Built of ashlar stone in a classic cruciform plan, it comprises a nave with aisles, north and south transepts, and a chancel surrounded by no fewer than four guild chapels — a sign of the wealth and importance of medieval Chesterfield. The church displays all the styles of English Gothic, from Early English through Decorated to Perpendicular.

It is the spire, however, for which the church is known the world over. Rising 228 feet above the ground, it is both twisted and leaning: a remarkable forty-five-degree twist causes its tip to lean some nine and a half feet off the centre. The precise reason for the distortion is uncertain and still debated, but the most widely accepted explanation combines two factors: the use of unseasoned "green" timber in the fourteenth-century framework, and the addition in the seventeenth century of some thirty-three tons of lead sheeting, whose great weight rested on bracing never designed to carry it, causing the timber to warp and the spire to twist as it dried and bent over the centuries. Another theory holds that the sun, heating the south side of the lead-covered spire more than the north, caused it to bend away from the heat. Inevitably, popular legend tells a more colourful tale: most of the stories involve the Devil, in one of which a Bolsover blacksmith mis-shod the Devil's hoof, so that the Devil leapt over the spire in pain and kicked it out of shape; in another, the Devil resting on the spire was so overcome by the smell of incense rising from a wedding below that he twisted around in surprise. In 1994 the church became the United Kingdom's only representative in the Association of the Twisted Spires of Europe — and of its seventy-two member churches, Chesterfield's is judged to have the greatest lean and twist of all.

Like most English churches, St Mary's suffered at the Reformation, losing much of its medieval decoration in the sixteenth century. It was repaired and partly rebuilt in the eighteenth century, including the north transept in 1769, and then thoroughly restored and embellished in the 1840s by the great Victorian architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, who installed a new ceiling and a new east window filled with stained glass by William Wailes of Newcastle; the church reopened after a nine-month closure on 9 May 1843. A peal of ten bells had been installed in the steeple beneath the spire in 1810, which in a quieter age could be heard up to four miles away.

Today St Mary and All Saints continues as a thriving Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Derby, the mother church of Chesterfield, with a full round of worship and a busy community life. Visitors come from far and wide to see the Crooked Spire, to climb the tower, and to explore the fine medieval church beneath it, with its guild chapels, its ancient font and its Victorian glass.

The church stands at the heart of the market town of Chesterfield, in north-east Derbyshire on the edge of the Peak District. The town's famous open-air market, one of the largest in England, lies close by, along with the Chesterfield Museum, the Chesterfield Canal, and the great country houses of the area — Hardwick Hall, Bolsover Castle and Chatsworth House are all within easy reach — while the moors and dales of the Peak District National Park rise to the west.

From its Anglo-Saxon font and medieval foundation in 1234, through the great fourteenth-century church and its extraordinary twisting spire, the Reformation losses and the Victorian restoration by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the Church of St Mary and All Saints gathers many centuries of Derbyshire history into one building. A Grade I listed church famous the world over for its Crooked Spire, it remains the living parish church of Chesterfield — one of the most beloved and unmistakable churches in England.