Church of St Peter and St Paul, Trottiscliffe

The Church of St Peter and St Paul is an active Anglican parish church in Church Lane, Trottiscliffe, in the Borough of Tonbridge and Malling, Kent. It sits below the North Downs on the lowest levels of the Lower Chalk, above a spring on the Gault clay at roughly 280 feet above sea level, and dates from the late eleventh century. It is a Pilgrim Church, standing near the Pilgrims' Way — the historic route said to have carried pilgrims from Winchester in Hampshire to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury — and it has been a Grade I listed building since 1959, considered by English Heritage a "building of exceptional interest". Its most famous possession is improbable for a small downland village: a grand pulpit that stood in Westminster Abbey until 1820.

The church was begun in the Norman era, to the design of an unknown architect, by the Bishop of Rochester — probably Gundulf, the great builder-bishop of the Tower of London and Rochester Castle, who lived in a house on the site of the neighbouring manor in the eleventh century. The distinctive opus spicatum masonry — herringbone work of whole flints, ironstone from the Folkestone Beds and Kentish ragstone — together with a reference in the Domesday Book, suggests a date of about 1080. The dressings are of tufa, and the rere-arches of the original windows are greensand. The building is a simple tower-nave-chancel composition covering 217 square metres, the nave and chancel apparently raised on a continuous foundation of large blocks, some of them sarsens — the same ancient stones that form the Neolithic Coldrum Long Barrow nearby. The chancel is only slightly smaller than the nave, and there is no chancel arch; a continuous rafter, collar and soulace roof, possibly fourteenth-century, runs over both.

The church grew gently through the Middle Ages. The south doorway into the nave and the north and south lancets at the west end were added in the thirteenth century — the south window may belong to that period too, though its complete Victorian rebuilding makes certainty impossible. In the early fourteenth century, possibly under Bishop Hamo Hethe, new stained glass was installed on the south-east side of the chancel, above a trefoil-headed piscina, and on the north-east side of the nave; original glass survives in the tracery of the north nave window, showing canopies with a quatrefoil depicting a figure of the Trinity. The fifteenth century brought the bell tower at the south-west, with the porch beneath it: a barrel vault runs through its north-east side to give access to the earlier south door, two contemporary buttresses brace the south wall, and the upper stage carries three two-light Perpendicular cinquefoil-headed windows under square hood moulds, with small trefoiled windows below, the whole finished with a parapet and a low pyramid roof. Brick repairs came in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in the late nineteenth the four-light west window and west wall were rebuilt in flint from local quarries, the three-light east window was replaced, Bath and Portland stone were used for repairs, and the churchyard was extended to the north-east around 1875. The flint and ragstone south boundary wall was rebuilt in 1975.

The pulpit is the church's great curiosity. With its stairs and sounding board, it dates from 1775 and was designed by Henry Keene, surveyor to Westminster Abbey, for the abbey itself. In 1820 it was removed from the abbey to create space for the coronation of George IV, held the following year; the abbey's surveyor Benjamin Dean Wyatt gave it to the owner of Court Lodge — the house beside the church that had been the Bishop's Palace until the end of the thirteenth century — and in 1824 it passed to the church, where its metropolitan splendour has presided over village congregations ever since. The other fittings keep good company: an octagonal font possibly of the fourteenth century, and an oak reredos, twisted-baluster altar rails and box pews of the eighteenth. The tower holds a bell cast by William Hatch in 1639 and a service bell of 1853 by C. & G. Mears of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry — at least three bells hung there before. Among the monuments are war memorials to the people of Trottiscliffe who died in the two World Wars and a brass of 1483 before the chancel step, with burial vaults beneath the church. The stained glass spans seven centuries, from the medieval Trinity fragment through the Ward and Hughes west window of 1885 to a late twentieth-century window by Keith and Judy Hill depicting Bishop Gundulf himself.

In the churchyard's north side lies the painter Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), one of the leading British artists of the twentieth century and a former resident of Trottiscliffe — a fittingly quiet resting place for the creator of the great Christ in Glory tapestry at Coventry Cathedral.

Administratively, St Peter and St Paul belongs to a united benefice with three neighbouring parishes known as the BART Group — Birling (All Saints), Addington (St Margaret), Ryarsh (St Martin) and Trottiscliffe — within the deanery of Malling, the archdeaconry of Tonbridge, the Diocese of Rochester and the Province of Canterbury. It remains an active parish church, holding a communion service on the second Sunday of each month and morning worship on the fourth, and it is open daily for visitors — a small Norman church above its spring, where Gundulf's herringbone masonry, a Westminster Abbey pulpit and a great modern painter's grave keep nine hundred years of history in a single quiet churchyard.