St James's Church, Kingston (Isle of Purbeck)

The Church of St James is the parish church of the tiny village of Kingston, perched high on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, with magnificent views over Corfe Castle and the surrounding countryside. It is a building of extraordinary quality and ambition — a great Gothic Revival church, built of local Purbeck stone at enormous expense for a private estate, and widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of its architect, George Edmund Street. So grand is it that it has been called "the Cathedral of the Purbecks", and it is a Grade I listed building, quite out of proportion to the small village it serves.

For centuries Kingston was a humble chapelry of the nearby parish of Corfe Castle, served from the twelfth century by a small chapel of ease. The transformation of the village's church owed everything to the wealthy Scott family, the Earls of Eldon, whose seat was nearby. In 1833 John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon — the great Lord Chancellor — demolished the old chapel and rebuilt it at his own expense, dedicated to St James and designed in the Gothic Revival style by George Stanley Repton, to serve as the parish church.

But the present church is the work of a later generation and a grander vision. In 1873 John Scott III, the 3rd Earl of Eldon, commissioned the eminent architect George Edmund Street — designer of the Royal Courts of Justice in London — to design a much larger church, on a new site in the village, to serve as a private chapel for the Eldon estate. Construction began the following year, and within only six years the church was complete, at a cost of £70,000 — a colossal sum for such a tiny village, equivalent to several million pounds today. Street built it of the beautiful local Purbeck stone and marble, with no expense spared, in his characteristic Early English Gothic style, vaulted in stone throughout and crowned by a fine tower. The result is a church of cathedral-like richness and craftsmanship, considered by many to be Street's finest work.

For its first decades St James's remained a private chapel of the Eldon estate. But in 1921 Lord Eldon conveyed the whole church to the Church Commissioners, and it was consecrated on 11 October that year; in January 1922 it replaced the 1833 chapel as the parish church of Kingston. The older chapel then served as the church hall for many years, until it was sold in 1977 and converted into a private house, which it remains. In the 1980s, because of its prominent and exposed hilltop position, serious repair work was needed to keep the great church standing, and its conservation has continued since.

Today St James's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Salisbury, serving the village of Kingston. Visitors come from far and wide to admire its remarkable architecture, its stone vaulting and its Purbeck marble, and to enjoy the spectacular views from its hilltop setting. It stands as a monument both to the wealth and piety of the Eldon family and to the genius of George Edmund Street.

The church stands in the hilltop village of Kingston, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, with sweeping views over the ruins of Corfe Castle and the Purbeck Hills. The dramatic ruins of Corfe Castle, the Swanage Railway, the seaside town of Swanage, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site with its cliffs and coves at Lulworth and Kimmeridge, the Purbeck heaths and the South West Coast Path are all close at hand, in one of the most beautiful corners of Dorset.

From the medieval chapelry of Corfe Castle, through the rebuilding of the chapel by the 1st Earl of Eldon in 1833 and the construction of George Edmund Street's magnificent church for the 3rd Earl in 1874–80, to its conveyance to the Church and its consecration as the parish church in 1921, St James's Church gathers the history of Kingston into one extraordinary building. A Grade I listed Gothic Revival masterpiece and "the Cathedral of the Purbecks", it remains the living parish church of Kingston — one of the finest Victorian churches in England, set amid the beauty of the Dorset hills.