St John's Church, Duxford

St John's Church at Duxford in Cambridgeshire, dedicated to St John the Baptist, stands at the junction of St John's Street and Green Street — a redundant Anglican church of the late twelfth century, Grade I listed since 1967 and vested in the Churches Conservation Trust, open daily all year round. Its walls carry one of the most extraordinary palimpsests of decoration of any village church in England: medieval wall paintings, schoolboy Latin graffiti, carved coffins with skeletons showing inside — and a drawing of Christ made by a wartime look-out soldier.

The tower, nave and chancel date from the late twelfth century; in the thirteenth the tower was raised and the chancel lengthened, and a two-bay chapel was added north of the chancel about 1330, with further windows later that century. The fifteenth century brought the north aisle and the porch, the sixteenth the east window, and the eighteenth various repairs in brick. The church is built of flint, pebbles and clunch with clunch and limestone dressings: a nave with north aisle, central tower, and chancel with north chapel. The timber-framed south porch, gabled and plaster-rendered with a small section of pargeting, shelters the church's finest single feature — the Norman doorway, decorated with chevrons, its tympanum carrying a rare stepped cross. Atop the battlemented tower sits a small lead-covered spirelet with a story: it is twisted, the result of a flagpole tied to it in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, then damaged in a gale.

Inside, the round-headed Norman tower arches survive from the twelfth century — the west arch with three attached columns, the east with a single column and a pair of carved dogs at its base. The font is thirteenth-century, a plain octagonal bowl on a clunch pedestal; the benches are late fifteenth-century, the communion rail late seventeenth-century with barley-twist balusters, and the floor tiles eighteenth-century. But it is the walls that hold the church's treasure. Medieval paintings include two bishops in the north aisle, figures thought to represent Christ and the Coronation of the Virgin, and fragments of a possible "Christ of the Trades" — the rare subject depicting working implements, warning the congregation that labouring on the Sabbath wounded Christ afresh. An Agnus Dei flanked by angels fills the space under the east tower arch, and the chancel's west wall carries saints — including a female saint, possibly St Margaret, undergoing torture — with scenes of the Crucifixion and Deposition. Around them crowd the centuries' graffiti: Latin scratchings in the north chapel and arcade from its years as a schoolroom (from the mid-seventeenth century until about 1847), a long desk in the chancel copiously carved — most strikingly with two small coffins, the skeletons visible inside — and, most recent of all, a depiction of Christ drawn in the nave by a look-out soldier during the Second World War.

The church's survival was a near thing. The parish was united with neighbouring St Peter's in 1874, and St John's fell derelict. Plans in the 1940s to make it an RAF memorial chapel — fitting, beside the famous Duxford airfield — never came to pass; the bells were removed in 1947, five going to St Peter's, and the same year the Rector applied to the Diocese of Ely to demolish the church, which had been "broken in to, defiled and misused in a great many and scandalous ways". The diocese refused. Redundancy was formally granted on 19 May 1976, and the church was vested in the Churches Conservation Trust on 26 July 1979; the tower and wall paintings were partially restored in 1985, though further restoration has stalled indefinitely.

The churchyard has its own quiet charms: two Grade II listed chest tombs, headstones now lining the western wall (cleared for safety, the yard cared for by Duxford Parish Council), and a "no mow" policy that fills the grass with snowdrops in early spring, cowslips in late spring, and ox-eye daisies, grasses and orchids in summer. And the old church is far from lifeless: volunteers stage summer classical concerts, book launches, poetry readings and masterclasses; the company This Is My Theatre has performed live drama inside and out since 2018 to great acclaim; an annual Advent Market ran until 2022; the village primary school and scouts visit each year; and the church — still consecrated — continues to host key parish services. In 2023 it even reached the screen, in one of four local films made in Duxford, "Thoughts and Prayers". Defiled, derelict and nearly demolished, St John's has outlived all its misfortunes — its painted walls still preaching to anyone who steps inside.