Church of St Mary and St Augustine, Stamford

The Church of St Mary and St Augustine in Stamford, Lincolnshire — known to everyone in the town simply as St Augustine's — is the Roman Catholic parish church of one of England's most beautiful stone towns, serving a congregation of the Diocese of Nottingham from its home on Broad Street. It was designed in a robust High Victorian Early English style by George Goldie, one of the foremost Catholic architects of nineteenth-century England, and built between 1862 and 1864. Though much of its Victorian interior was stripped out in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it retains furnishings and fittings of real distinction, and its story — from Masses said secretly in Stamford cellars under the penal laws to a four-bishop opening ceremony in 1865 — is a compact history of the Catholic revival in provincial England.

Catholic worship survived in Stamford through the long years of the anti-Catholic penal laws in hidden form: Mass was celebrated secretly in some of the town's numerous cellars, in particular that of number 24, High Street St Martin's. When toleration came, a chapel in the Gothic style opened in All Saints Street in 1834 — in the 1830s one of only six Catholic chapels in the whole of Lincolnshire — and served the mission for thirty years. The first resident parish priest of the post-Reformation parish, from 1833 to 1838, was William Wareing, a man destined for larger things: at the Restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in 1850 he became the first Bishop of Northampton.

The new church was built on the north side of Broad Street, on the site of the Dolphin public house, and was originally styled Our Lady & St Augustine in the continental Catholic manner — the form Nikolaus Pevsner used when he described it. The dedication to St Augustine of Canterbury, apostle of the English, likely reflected the pro-English sympathies of its patrons: Charles Ormston Eaton, a local banker of Tolethorpe Hall, and Charles Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough, both belonged to the wave of nineteenth-century converts that followed the Oxford Movement, at a time when most English Catholic congregations had a distinctly Irish character. Goldie gave them a church of nave, two-bay aisle with round Romanesque arches, canted sanctuary, small apsed south chapel and north porch, accompanied by a presbytery and, from 1870, a parish school of his design, the group arranged around a small garden facing Broad Street.

The Stamford Mercury was thrilled, predicting "the prettiest modern Gothic erection in the town" and judging the finished building, "taking the size of the town into consideration, probably equal to any erected in England in modern times." Its reporter lavished praise on the Caen stone altar and reredos with their gold monograms of Our Lady and St Austin ringed by ball-flower ornament, the shafts of serpentine and black marble, the bas-relief angels, and the four gas coronas of fifteen jets each whose light on the altar was "gorgeous and... very imposing". Pevsner, writing in an age that had little patience for Victoriana, was cooler — he called the little campanile "an unbelievable bell-turret, asymmetrically placed and most crudely detailed" — though even he allowed that it provides the focus of the view east along Broad Street. One exterior detail carries special meaning for the town: carved on the gable end is the medieval seal of the Borough of Stamford, showing a burgess kneeling before the Virgin and Child with the Latin motto Stanford Burgenses Virgo Fundant Tibi Preces — "To Thee, O Virgin, the Burgesses of Stamford Pour Out Prayers" — a seal unused in Stamford since the Reformation, of which an example survives in the British Museum.

The formal opening on 6 June 1865 was an event of remarkable splendour for a small Lincolnshire town. Four bishops took part — Roskell of Nottingham, Amherst of Northampton, the retired William Wareing, and Grant of Southwark — together with the mitred abbot of Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire and some thirty clergy, the bishops "invested in rich copes and mitres" forming "a very imposing spectacle" as High Mass was celebrated "with considerable splendour". Charles Ormston Eaton then presided over a celebratory lunch at the George Hotel, with the architect Goldie, the Marchioness of Lothian and assorted dignitaries among the guests, before the whole party returned to church at three o'clock for Benediction and a sermon from an eminent London Jesuit. Goldie's invoice records the final cost of church and presbytery with Victorian precision: £2,296, no shillings and sixpence.

The interior has had a more turbulent history than the exterior. In the small Lady Chapel that Goldie designed expressly for it stands a large mid-nineteenth-century statue of the Madonna and Child by Franz Mayer & Co. of Munich, the gift of the recusant Lamb family of Axwell Park, County Durham — a statue that survived more than one past attempt to dispose of it. The stained glass in St Joseph's chapel, installed to some acclaim in 1873–74, is by William Wailes, the Newcastle glassmaker and associate of Pugin who exhibited at the Great Exhibition. The organ by J. W. Walker & Sons, donated in 1866 by Charles Ormston Eaton, remains in full working order, and the church's bell — a tenor G cast by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough — has hung in the campanile since 1871. The stencilled and painted sanctuary ceiling of 1874 may owe its main beam to Christopher Dresser, the pioneering designer.

The twentieth century treated this Victorian ensemble harshly, and, as the parish's own historians acknowledge, the damage was done entirely by the church's custodians. A zealous post-war refurbishment in 1951 removed much of the most elaborate neo-Gothic furnishing — including, unaccountably, a First World War memorial, of which a single panel commemorating a Captain Fenwick survives in the Lady Chapel. A further redevelopment in 1982 swept away the great stone altar with its porphyry columns and the terracotta altar rails by Blashfield of Stamford, save a fragment in the Lady Chapel; the present sanctuary and freestanding altar of local Collyweston stone date from that campaign. Around the turn of the twenty-first century a solid gold late-Georgian chalice and paten and an elaborate neo-Gothic silver-gilt monstrance were also disposed of. Yet the post-war years gave as well as took: the extensive, high-quality linenfold panelling by Bowmans of Stamford was completed in 1945, the hand-carved wooden Stations of the Cross were donated at the war's end by American servicemen stationed locally, in memory of their residence and of the dead of both World Wars, and St Joseph's Chapel was redesigned by Lawrence Bond of Grantham, conservator of Lincoln Cathedral. Recent years have seen considerable efforts to restore the building's Victorian character.

St Augustine's matters beyond Stamford because its architect mattered. George Goldie's works include Cardinal Manning's Our Lady of Victories in Kensington and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Sligo, with churches across England, Scotland and Ireland and as far afield as Durban in South Africa — making St Augustine's one of the few Victorian buildings in this famously Georgian town designed by an architect of more than local reputation. Today it remains a living parish church, its bell still sounding over Broad Street from Pevsner's "unbelievable" turret, the burgesses' prayer to the Virgin carved once more above a Stamford street.