St Andrew's Church, Penrith

St Andrew's Church stands at the heart of Penrith, the old red-sandstone market town on the edge of the Lake District, and tells the story of the troubled Anglo-Scottish border in its very walls. It is an active Anglican parish church in the deanery of Penrith and the Diocese of Carlisle, united in a single benefice with Christ Church Penrith, St John's Newton Reigny and St John the Evangelist Plumpton Wall, and it is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a Grade I listed building. In earlier times the parish also maintained a chapel of ease called St Saviour's in Brougham Street in the Castletown suburb, and another, All Hallows, at the hamlet of Bowscar north of the town.

The oldest part of the church is its tower, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with its top stage added or rebuilt in the fifteenth. Its lower stages were designed as much for defence as for devotion: the walls are massively thick, there are no buttresses, the windows are tiny, and originally there was no entrance at ground level — a refuge for townspeople when Scottish raiders swept down the Eden valley. The rest of the medieval church survived until the eighteenth century, when it was judged beyond repair. In 1721–22 the old nave was completely demolished and rebuilt, a project driven forward by the vicar Hugh Todd and almost certainly designed by William Etty of York. The motives were as much social as structural: the rebuilding swept away the private encroachments of local landowning families on the church's space, enlarged the accommodation, and recast the interior to suit the liturgical practice and classical taste of the Georgian age. The work, completed by 1722 (with refinements continuing across the following decades), gave the tower its diagonal buttresses and the church its handsome Neoclassical west doorway, framed by Doric columns, a triglyph frieze and a triangular pediment.

The result is one of the finest Georgian church interiors in the north of England. The body of the church, built of red sandstone ashlar against the rubble of the old tower, runs to an eight-bay nave and two-bay chancel ending in a shallow square apse, its sides articulated by two tiers of round-arched windows between broad pilasters, with three east windows gathered under a single great arch and a sundial on the south wall. Inside, galleries wrap around the north, west and south sides, carried on Tuscan columns that continue upward as timber quasi-Tuscan columns to the ceiling. At the east end hang two paintings of 1845 — the Angel and the Shepherds, and the Agony in the Garden — by the Penrith artist Jacob Thompson. The communion table dates from the rebuilding of 1722; the pulpit is the top stage of a former three-decker; royal arms of 1723 by Mathias Read hang at the back of the gallery; and the plain octagonal font bears the date 1661, when it was restored to use after the Restoration of Charles II. The brass chandeliers carry a story of national drama: they were given in 1746 by the 2nd Duke of Portland in recognition of Penrith's part in the defence of the realm against the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in the rising of 1745.

The glass and monuments span seven centuries. The east window of 1870 is by Hardman, the north aisle glass of 1889 by Burlison and Grylls, with further windows by Clayton and Bell, Powell's, Baguley and Cox, Sons and Buckley. One window holds an image of Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, niece by marriage of Geoffrey Chaucer, wife of Ralph Neville and mother of the Yorkist commander at Towton — a thread connecting this border town to the dynastic politics of the Wars of the Roses. Medieval coffin lids carved with foliated crosses, one fourteenth-century and one possibly twelfth-century, and two worn seventeenth-century effigies survive from the older church. The organ history begins with a Samuel Green instrument of 1796 in the west gallery, succeeded by a Forster and Andrews organ of 1868, rebuilt repeatedly down to Andrew Carter's work of 2015. The tower carries a ring of eight bells, six cast in 1763 by Lester and Pack at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and a fine clock of 1889 by Potts of Leeds, built with a double three-legged gravity escapement on Lord Grimthorpe's principle, dark blue cast-iron dials and gilded copper hands.

The churchyard holds Penrith's most celebrated antiquities. The Giant's Grave, a scheduled monument arranged in its present form since at least 1664–65, comprises two tenth-century Anglo-Saxon cross shafts flanked by four hogback tombstones — by legend the burial of the giant king Owen Caesarius. Nearby stands the Giant's Thumb, another tenth-century wheel-headed cross shaft, re-erected on a modern base in 1887. A Gothic Revival monument of 1846 commemorates Robert Vertue, an engineer of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, and a Celtic cross war memorial of 1919 completes a churchyard where Saxon, medieval, Georgian and modern Penrith lie side by side.