St Mary's Church, Eccleston, Cheshire

St Mary's Church stands in the village of Eccleston, in Cheshire, on the great estate of the Dukes of Westminster a few miles south of the city of Chester. A magnificent red sandstone church built at the very end of the nineteenth century, it is one of the finest works of the celebrated Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley, and is designated a Grade I listed building. Raised at the expense of the immensely wealthy 1st Duke of Westminster, and serving as the estate church close to his seat at Eaton Hall, St Mary's is a jewel of late Victorian church architecture, and the burial place of the Grosvenor family, the Dukes of Westminster themselves.

There has been a church at Eccleston for many centuries: a church was certainly in existence here by 1188, and a print made in the late eighteenth century shows a dilapidated medieval church dating back to the fourteenth century. The present building is the third parish church to have stood in the village. The medieval church was entirely replaced in 1809 by a new church of similar size, built by the architect William Porden for the Earls Grosvenor, to which a chancel was added in 1853. But by the end of the nineteenth century the 1st Duke of Westminster — one of the richest men in the world — decided to replace Porden's church with an entirely new and far grander structure.

The new church was built between 1897 and 1899 to the designs of G. F. Bodley, at a cost of £40,000 — an enormous sum, equivalent to several million pounds today — and was consecrated on Ascension Day in 1900. It stands about a hundred metres south-west of the site of its predecessors, which is now known as the Old Churchyard; after the new church was completed, Porden's church was demolished, though the south wall of its nave was retained as a "picturesque feature" and still stands in the Old Churchyard, where the Dukes of Westminster are buried.

Bodley's church is a building of the highest quality, built of red ashlar sandstone in a refined Gothic Revival style. Its plan comprises a west tower, a continuous six-bay nave, a chancel with a clerestory, north and south aisles, and north and south porches, with a long vestry block projecting to the north. The tower, with its tall bell-openings, irregular buttresses, embattled top and canopied niches filled with statues, is a particularly fine composition, and the interior is richly furnished and decorated in the manner for which Bodley was renowned, with fine woodwork, stained glass and fittings. The church is widely regarded as one of Bodley's masterpieces, and a perfect expression of the wealth and taste of the Grosvenor family at the height of their power.

Today St Mary's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Chester, its benefice combined with that of St Mary at nearby Pulford. It serves the village of Eccleston and the Eaton estate, and remains a place of beauty and quiet dignity, set among the trees and parkland of one of the great country estates of England.

The church stands in the estate village of Eccleston, in the flat green countryside of the River Dee south of Chester. The great house of Eaton Hall, the seat of the Dukes of Westminster, lies close by within its vast park, while the historic walled city of Chester, with its cathedral, its Roman walls and its medieval Rows, the racecourse of the Roodee, and the wider Cheshire countryside and the Welsh border are all within easy reach.

From the medieval church recorded at Eccleston in 1188, through the Georgian church built by William Porden for the Earls Grosvenor, to the magnificent new church built by G. F. Bodley for the 1st Duke of Westminster in 1897–99, St Mary's Church gathers the long history of this estate village into one building. A Grade I listed masterpiece of the Gothic Revival and the burial place of the Dukes of Westminster, it remains the living parish church of Eccleston — one of the finest Victorian churches in Cheshire.