St Julian's Church, Kingston Buci

St Julian's Church at Kingston Buci — Kingston by Sea on modern maps — stands between Southwick and Shoreham-by-Sea on the West Sussex coast, the Grade I listed church of a Saxon village whose old boundaries have long been swallowed by residential development, but whose parish still carries the ancient name. With late Saxon walls, a thirteenth-century form, the ghost of an anchorite's cell and a pulpit that dominates its interior like a ship's bridge, it is among the most rewarding small churches of the Adur valley.

Kingston — the name was originally plain Kingston — was founded as an Anglo-Saxon settlement, possibly with Celtic influence. At the Domesday survey of 1086 the manor was held by Ralph de Buci, whose family gave the place its suffix, on behalf of William de Braose, first Lord of Bramber, and a church was already established; excavations in the 1960s found that the foundations and the surviving nave walls are late Saxon, predating the Conquest by a few years. The church was dedicated to Julian of Le Mans in the twelfth century — a rare dedication — and in the thirteenth took its present form, when the chancel and central tower were built to create the simple three-cell layout of nave, tower and chancel, with a two-bay north aisle and a south porch added at the same time. The de Buci family held the advowson until the manor passed from them in 1356; since 1826, when George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont, acquired it, the patrons have been the Earls of Egremont and their successors of the Leconfield baronetcy — the current patron being Max Wyndham, second Baron Egremont.

The church's most haunting feature is what remains of its anchorite's cell. These rare structures housed hermits who pursued the ascetic life to its limit: walled up inside for life, connected to the church only by a window into the chancel. At St Julian's the cell itself was removed by the fourteenth century, but the window — a form of hagioscope — and a door survive in perfect condition, with the roofline of the vanished cell still traceable on the wall; the door would have been built over while the anchorite lived within.

The building is of flint with stone dressings: nave with north aisle, chancel, and central though slightly offset tower of the same width as the chancel, with no transepts, capped outside by a shallow pyramidal hipped roof of pantiles. The eleventh-century nave walls survive, and the thirteenth-century rebuilding seems not to have altered the church's proportions. The aisle was rebuilt in the nineteenth century, but its large arches — "beautifully proportioned", in Pevsner's judgment — remain from the thirteenth. The tower's lower stage is rib-vaulted, the moulded ribs resting on columns with rounded abaci, so that it forms the quire. Lancet and Perpendicular windows were added in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Victorian restoration renewed windows (keeping the Perpendicular style except for a large lancet in the east wall), improved the aisle and buttressed the nave.

The interior is full of character. The Lewknor family, holders of the advowson in the sixteenth century, built an Easter Sepulchre at the north end of the chancel containing their tomb, with ogee mouldings and carvings of the Pietà, the Resurrection and the Trinity. There is a fourteenth-century chancel screen, a rare singing-desk, box pews, and the great eighteenth-century two-decker pulpit whose lower deck — an uncommon feature — serves as a separate priest's reading desk. The organ has the most eccentric history of all: it was moved here from the Brighton Aquarium, still bears a bronze plaque recording its former home, and retains its original hand-pumping mechanism alongside the electric blower. The organist sits perched high in the gallery — and the view over the organist's shoulder, as the parish cheerfully admits, is not for the faint-hearted.

Listed Grade I on 8 May 1950 — one of only seven such buildings in Adur district — St Julian's remains an active Anglican parish church. Its parish of 782 acres still follows the ancient boundaries: Kingston Lane to the east, the border with Shoreham to the west, the River Adur to the south and the downland field boundaries to the north — the Saxon village's footprint, kept alive by its church.