St Mary de Haura Church, Shoreham-by-Sea

St Mary de Haura Church is the great medieval church of Shoreham-by-Sea, in the Adur district of West Sussex — a building of such scale and quality that it has been called "a parish church absolutely without a fellow in England". Founded at the end of the eleventh century to serve the bustling new port of New Shoreham, it was built as a large cruciform church on a scale that reflected the wealth and ambition of the town and its lords, the de Braose family. Remarkably, the church that stands today is only the surviving eastern half of that mighty building, yet it remains one of the finest examples of late-Norman and early-Gothic architecture in the country, and is listed at Grade I for its exceptional importance.

The church belongs to the founding of New Shoreham itself. After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror granted the Rape of Bramber to the de Braose family, who founded a new settlement, New Shoreham, on the estuary where the River Adur meets the English Channel. Laid out on a grid of streets around its High Street, the new town's harbour quickly grew prosperous, overtaking rival Sussex ports and gaining royal patronage — King John stationed his fleet here in the early thirteenth century — as the closest Channel port to London. To serve this thriving town, the de Braoses founded a great church around 1096, the first documentary evidence dating from a deed of 1103 connected with Philip de Braose's return from the First Crusade.

As first built, the church had a central tower with transepts, a nave, and a chancel ending in an apse with rounded chapels. But from the 1170s onwards, at the height of the town's prosperity and under William de Braose, the 3rd Lord of Bramber, everything to the east of the nave was rebuilt on a magnificent scale, with a tall, five-bay quire covered by a four-celled rib vault, vaulted aisles, a triforium and a clerestory. To support these vaulted aisles, flying buttresses were added to the exterior soon afterwards — one of the earliest uses of this structural technique in England. By about 1225 the church had reached its greatest extent, at a time when New Shoreham was powerful enough to challenge even Chichester for the position of county town.

The town's fortunes did not last. As its trade routes were lost and the coast was reshaped by erosion and shifting tides, the harbour became dangerous and parts of the grid-pattern town were washed away; and when the de Braose line failed by 1500, the town was left with a church far larger than it could maintain. The fabric gradually decayed, and around the year 1700 the original Norman nave collapsed in a storm, cutting the length of the church roughly in half. The rubble was cleared, and the great twelfth-century quire was adapted to become the new nave and chancel — which is the church we see today, still a large and impressive building, but only the eastern portion of the original.

Architecturally, St Mary de Haura is built of pale stone and cobbled flint with ashlar dressings, beneath a roof of local Horsham stone tiles. Its oldest surviving parts — the transepts and their chapels, part of the tower, and the tower arches with their boldly scalloped capitals — date from around 1130 or earlier. The tower, perched above the roof and flanked by the transepts, was built in two twelfth-century stages, and Nikolaus Pevsner admired it as a "noble composite", comparing it to the church towers of northern France. The former quire that now forms the body of the church is a place of soaring beauty, its tall vaulting giving it a spacious grandeur, and its details blending late-Norman and early-Gothic forms — the alternating round and octagonal columns of the north aisle have been compared to those of the contemporary Canterbury Cathedral, and the church has been described as, "along with Canterbury, the most continental of English churches".

Today St Mary de Haura, listed Grade I in 1950, serves a small but central parish covering the old grid-pattern town. Since 1897 it has been part of a united benefice with the older St Nicolas' Church at Old Shoreham, served by the same vicar. Although St Nicolas' is the older church, the size and central position of St Mary de Haura make it the de facto "town church" of Shoreham-by-Sea, the venue for the great services of the year, for Remembrance Sunday, and for the town's major religious and civic events. Its main service is the Sunday morning Eucharist, with evening services including traditional evensong.

The church stands on Church Street in the heart of Shoreham-by-Sea, close to the High Street and the River Adur. The historic harbour and the houseboats of the Adur, the long shingle beach and the wooden lighthouse, the Marlipins Museum (one of the oldest secular buildings in England), the South Downs National Park rising behind the town, and the wider Sussex coast between Brighton and Worthing are all within easy reach.

From its founding around 1096 to serve the great medieval port of New Shoreham, through its magnificent twelfth-century rebuilding by the de Braose lords, its early flying buttresses, and the loss of half the church in the storms of around 1700, to its life today as the town church of Shoreham, St Mary de Haura gathers more than nine centuries of Sussex history into one building. A Grade I listed church of exceptional interest — the great surviving fragment of a still greater church — it remains one of the most remarkable parish churches in England.