St Laurence and All Saints Church

St Laurence and All Saints, Eastwood, is a Grade I listed medieval church on the edge of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, and one of the most extraordinary survival stories in English church history — a building of Norman origin that stood essentially undisturbed for nine hundred years, only to spend the early twenty-first century fighting for its life against the runway of London Southend Airport, whose perimeter fence runs along its churchyard. It has been described as "one of the finest and most important small medieval churches in South Essex, and of exceptional architectural, archaeological and historical significance", with a complex building history, a celebrated Norman font, twelfth-century doors with their original ironwork, medieval woodwork including a rare priest's room, and a site of "considerable, possibly exceptional, archaeological significance".

Eastwood took its name from its position on the eastern side of the woods and parkland of Rayleigh and Thundersley, once part of the Great Forest of Essex. The village appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Estwa", held by Suen of Essex, whose father Robert had held it under Edward the Confessor. Suen's son Robert of Essex founded Prittlewell Priory in 1100, and in that same year made the first known record of this church, granting the chapels of Eastwood, Sutton and Prittlewell to the Prior of Prittlewell. A church plainly existed at Eastwood before that date — probably the present Norman nave with a small apsidal chancel — and the antiquity of the site runs deeper still: a sarsen stone is built into the walls, claimed by some as a relic of pagan worship on the spot. After Henry of Essex forfeited his estates to the Crown in 1163, charged with treason and cowardice in battle, the manor was generally held by the Crown; thirteenth-century kings came to the district to hunt from Hadleigh Castle, and Henry VIII was the last king known to have hunted here. The manor passed at the Reformation to Lord Rich, whose descendants became Earls of Warwick, then by marriage to the Earl of Nottingham, and later to the Bristow family until 1866; the great house of Eastwoodbury, on the site of the original manor house immediately east of the church, was demolished in 1954, by which time the old 3,000-acre woodland parish had become farmland and finally suburb.

The fabric of the church is a textbook of English parish-church development. The nave is twelfth-century, the oldest part of the building, with original Norman window openings surviving in the north wall; the south aisle was pierced through in the thirteenth century with three Early English bays on octagonal columns, the north aisle followed in the fourteenth with two wide arches springing directly from the wall, and the chancel is thirteenth-century beneath a fourteenth-century roof. The nave roof of the fifteenth century rides on massive tie beams with octagonal crown posts of unusual quality for a village church — when it was re-tiled in 1935 the seven-inch beams were found as sound as the day they were installed. The brick south porch was added in the sixteenth century, before the Reformation, and keeps its niche over the door and a holy water stoup. The little tower, only six and a half feet square and unusually placed at the west end of the south aisle, carries a timber-framed, shingled upper stage and a broach spire; after the Second World War the spire was repaired by the Canadian Government as a lasting memorial to the airmen who had flown from Southend. A thorough Victorian restoration by William White in the 1870s gave the church its seating, and in 1971 the old cement render was stripped from the exterior, revealing walls of ragstone rubble with flint, limestone dressings, and patches of Roman and Tudor brick that record centuries of running repairs.

Tradition says the very plan of the church honours its patron: St Laurence was martyred on a gridiron in the year 258, and the layout is said to take a gridiron's form, the chancel its handle, the nave and aisles its bars. Inside, the whitewashed interior keeps traces of medieval painted decoration and a remarkable inventory of treasures. The font is the best example in Essex of a late Norman font of the twelfth century, its drum carved with semicircular arcading interlaced into pointed arches. The two ancient doors are the most interesting in the district: their strap ironwork is of the twelfth or even eleventh century, probably the work of a local smith, and the horizontal strap of the south door carries an inscription in Lombardic letters — "Pax regat intrantes eadem regat egredientes", "May peace rule those entering and also those leaving". The south door bears a triangular sanctuary knocker, and the rolls of Edward I record its use: a man condemned to hang at Eastwood for stealing three pigs escaped when the rope broke, fled to the church for sanctuary, and was pardoned and exiled. At the west end of the north aisle survives a small and unusual fifteenth-century priest's room, an oak-framed apartment of two storeys behind a moulded and embattled plank screen, its massive nail-studded door still on what are probably its original hinges — perhaps a sacristy and muniment room, or lodging for the monk who served the church from Prittlewell Priory. A hagioscope, or squint, cut through the angle of the chancel wall gives a view of the high altar from the south aisle; a low side window in the chancel may have served for ringing the sanctus bell at the Elevation; and the south aisle, once probably a Lady Chapel with its fourteenth-century piscina and aumbry, bears medieval graffiti of a knight in armour and a curious serpent. Among the monuments are eighteenth-century tombs of the Vassal family of Cockethurst Farm, a brass effigy of Thomas Burroughs dated 1600, and an oak table thought to have served as the Communion table in Cromwell's time.

The tower holds three ancient bells — two cast in 1380, inscribed to St Gregory and St Katherine, and one of 1693 by Charles Newman. In 1984 the tower was strengthened with a new metal frame, the cracked medieval bell was repaired by welding, and three new bells from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry brought the ring to six. The stained glass ranges from the east window of 1887 by Cox, Sons, Buckley & Co. to a west window of 1978 by Francis Skeat depicting Samuel Purchas, the geographer and travel writer who was Eastwood's most notable incumbent. The churchyard, managed for its wildlife and scattered with eighteenth-century chest tombs, holds war graves from both world wars and one famous resident of another kind: Louis Boswell, the "King of the Gypsies", buried here in 1835 "in the presence of a vast concourse of spectators" — the church having long been favoured by the travelling community for its christenings, weddings and funerals.

The church's modern drama began in October 2001, when the operators of London Southend Airport proposed extending the runway and moving the thousand-year-old church bodily — jacking it onto a "chassis" and rolling it a hundred metres on rails to clear the Civil Aviation Authority's safety zones. Protesters, the local MP David Amess and English Heritage fought the scheme; English Heritage observed that "no church that old has been moved before", and in January 2002 the building's listing was upgraded to Grade I, placing it among the two per cent most important buildings in the country. When moving the church failed, the airport proposed lowering its walls and removing the spire; when that failed, in January 2003, it applied to demolish the church outright. Southend Council unanimously refused. The threat lifted only in December 2003, when permission was granted for an instrument landing system with traffic lights on Eastwoodbury Lane, and the airport's appeal was finally withdrawn in November 2004. The expansion of 2008–2011 under new owners Stobart found a gentler solution: Eastwoodbury Lane was diverted, the runway extended away from the building, and the church lost only a short section of wall, replaced by a yew hedge, with a quieter, traffic-free setting in compensation. Today the aircraft still pass low over the churchyard, but St Laurence and All Saints stands intact — a Norman church that saw off a twenty-first-century airport, still in use as a Church of England parish church in the Diocese of Chelmsford, and one of the most remarkable medieval survivals in Essex.