Church of St Mary, Watford

St Mary's Church is the ancient parish church of Watford, in Hertfordshire, standing in the heart of the town on the High Street, some sixteen miles north-west of London. Thought to be at least eight hundred years old, it is the oldest building in the town centre, a medieval church that has watched over Watford as it grew from a small market town into a busy modern centre. A Church of England parish church in the Diocese of St Albans, it is notable for the tombs of local nobility it contains, and in particular for some outstanding monumental sculpture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

The origins of the church are lost in the absence of records — the earliest parish registers begin only in 1539 — but the building is understood to be considerably older. The church seen today is mainly of the fifteenth century, but the oldest parts of its fabric date from around 1230, and during renovations in 1871 the restorers found that twelfth-century stonework had been incorporated into the later medieval building, and that the basin of a twelfth-century font had been re-used as rubble in the tower walls. This suggests that St Mary's was probably established around the time that the charter was granted for Watford's market to the Lord of the Manor of Cashio — who was an Abbot of the great St Albans Abbey — most likely in the reign of King Henry I or King Henry II in the twelfth century. The church thus grew up with the medieval market town, and has been its spiritual centre ever since.

The greatest treasures of St Mary's are its monuments, especially those in the Essex Chapel — also known as the Morrison Chapel — which contains magnificent tombs of the Morrison family, lords of the manor in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. These richly carved monuments, with their painted effigies and elaborate architectural canopies, are among the finest of their kind in the county, the work of leading sculptors of the day, and they make the church a place of real importance in the history of English funerary art. Among the past vicars of St Mary's was William Capel, a son of the Earl of Essex and a noted amateur cricketer.

The church has its royal associations too. On 18 July 1909 King Edward VII attended a service at St Mary's during a visit to the Earl of Clarendon at his nearby house, the Grove; the king entered the church through the door of the Essex Chapel, which has been known ever since as the Edward VII door.

Today St Mary's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of St Albans, the parish church of Watford, at the centre of the town. Despite the growth of the modern town around it, it retains its medieval character and its fine monuments, a place of history and peace amid the bustle of the High Street. It remains both a working church and a precious link to the long history of Watford.

The church stands on the High Street in the centre of Watford, in Hertfordshire, on the edge of Greater London. The town's shops and the Watford Colosseum lie close by, along with the great park of Cassiobury, the Grand Union Canal, the country house of the Grove, Vicarage Road — the home of Watford Football Club — and the wider Hertfordshire countryside, with the Chiltern Hills and the city of St Albans, with its great cathedral, within easy reach.

From its probable foundation in the twelfth century alongside the medieval market town, through the medieval church of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the magnificent Morrison monuments of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, and the visit of King Edward VII, St Mary's Church gathers some eight centuries of the history of Watford into one building. The ancient parish church and the oldest building in the town centre, it remains the living mother church of Watford — a medieval survival at the heart of a modern town.