St James' Church, Stretham, Cambridgeshire

St James' Church, Stretham, is the active Anglican parish church of a fenland village of some 1,700 people four miles south of Ely in Cambridgeshire, a Grade II* listed building founded in the twelfth century and one of eight churches in the Ely Team Ministry. Its earliest written record carries a whiff of intrigue: the Liber Eliensis, the twelfth-century history of the Isle of Ely, relates that in 1137, in the time of Bishop Nigel, Anglo-Saxon conspirators were said to have met in Stretham church, and fragments of the east chancel, including two clamped buttresses in the east wall, survive from that century to corroborate the church's existence.

The building as it stands is mainly fourteenth-century, with an ashlar-faced tower of that period buttressed at its angles, its west window of three lights filled with flowing tracery. The interior preserves a fine sequence of medieval fittings: a lowered sill on the chancel's southeast window forming a three-seat sedilia; an aumbry in the north wall; and beside it an arched tomb recess whose inscribed lid commemorates Nicholas de Kyngestone, rector in the late thirteenth century. The very finely carved oak chancel screen dates from 1440. In 1751 the antiquary Francis Blomefield recorded the church with its square tower, four bells and a clock, a leaded north aisle, and a chantry chapel at the east end with a screen, which he concluded to be the Chancel of the Resurrection.

The parish's history holds some unexpected connections. Lancelot Ridley, appointed one of the first Six Preachers of Canterbury Cathedral in 1541 and rector of Stretham from 1560, was buried in the parish; his son Mark Ridley became physician to the Tsar of Russia. And lying in the chancel is a black marble slab of 1667 commemorating Anne Brunsell, wife of the then rector and sister of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul's Cathedral.

The church owes its present form chiefly to the heavy restoration of 1876 by the architect J. P. St Aubyn at a cost of £4,400, which added the north and south transepts, the whole south aisle of the nave, the chancel, a clerestory and a new porch. The same year brought the turret clock on the east face of the tower, made by J. B. Joyce and Company of Whitchurch in Shropshire, the oldest firm of tower clockmakers in the world; wound weekly by the churchwardens, it still keeps good time. The east window of the chancel holds five stained glass lights beneath Gothic tracery, and the church is floodlit with support from the National Lottery church floodlighting trust. The organ, built in 1886 by J. W. Walker and Sons of London in a chamber on the south wall of the chancel, was reconstructed and enlarged in 1907 by Paddy Benson of Norman and Beard for £350 and converted to electric blowing after 1937.

The tower carries a ring of six bells hung for change ringing. Until 1952 there were five; in that year a sixth was added and one bell recast, replacing a bell of 1727 by Henry Penn of Peterborough. The oldest is the number four of 1796 by Joseph Eayre, 840 millimetres across and weighing 360 kilograms, and the newest are of 1951 by John Taylor and Company of Loughborough. Seventy-eight peals have been recorded at Stretham since 1952 in the records begun by Canon K. W. H. Felstead, and after several years of silence, regular ringing resumed in June 2011, the band ringing from a first-floor chamber above the recently built servery and toilets.

First listed Grade A in February 1952 and regraded II* in 1988, the church keeps its records at the County Records Office in Cambridge and has shared an ecumenical agreement with the Stretham Methodists since 1990. It serves its village today within the Ely Team Ministry alongside the churches of Ely, Little Downham, Chettisham, Little Thetford and Stuntney, a small fenland church whose twelfth-century stones have seen conspirators, Canterbury preachers, a Tsar's physician and the sister of England's greatest architect pass through its story.