St Mary's Church, Ewell

The Church of St Mary the Virgin at Ewell is the civic church of the borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, standing in a prominent position near the centre of the historic village of Ewell. Although the present building is a handsome Victorian church of 1848, it stands in a parish where there has been a church since the thirteenth century, and the medieval belltower of its predecessor still survives in the churchyard. With its fine furnishings, its medieval survivals and its connection to one of the most famous of Pre-Raphaelite painters, St Mary's gathers the long history of Ewell into one building.

There has been a church dedicated to St Mary the Virgin in Ewell since at least the thirteenth century, and a board above the south door of the present church records the names of the incumbents from 1239 to the present day — an unbroken succession of nearly eight centuries. The old medieval church was demolished in the nineteenth century, for two reasons: it had fallen into such a parlous state of structural repair that it was likely to collapse, and the incumbent of the day, Sir George Lewen Glyn — who was both Rector and Lord of the Manor at once — is said to have resented the carts of his parishioners passing his rectory and manor house on their way to Sunday worship, and so had the new church built at a more convenient distance. Only the fifteenth-century belltower of the old church was spared, and it still stands in the churchyard today, a picturesque relic of the medieval building.

The present church was dedicated in 1848. Designed by the local architect Henry Clutton, it was built in a simple and modest form of the Decorated Gothic style — apart from an ostentatious vaulted west porch added around 1905 — and faced with Swanage stone, with Bath stone mullions and tracery. The north aisle was enlarged in the late nineteenth century. The real glories of the church, however, are within: a fine marble pulpit, and, brought from the old medieval church, the medieval font and the chancel screen, the latter extended somewhat to fit the larger chancel arch of the new building. These survivals link the Victorian church to its medieval predecessor and to the long worship of the parish.

The church has a special connection with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The great painter William Holman Hunt was a resident of Ewell, and it was here, by the disused gunpowder mills on Kingston Road, that he painted the original of "The Light of the World" — one of the most famous and widely reproduced religious paintings ever made, showing Christ knocking at a door. When a fire broke out in the church in 1973, started by the explosion of the central-heating boiler, it destroyed the north aisle and everything in it, including a fine organ of 1865 by the celebrated builder "Father" Henry Willis — but, remarkably, a print of Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" survived the blaze. The church was afterwards able to acquire a similar Willis organ, closely comparable to the famous instrument in Truro Cathedral, from a London church under threat of closure.

Today St Mary's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Guildford, and as the civic church of Epsom and Ewell. It remains the historic heart of Ewell, its Victorian church and its surviving medieval tower standing together as a record of the parish's long history.

The church stands in the village of Ewell, in the borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, on the southern edge of Greater London. The springs at Ewell give rise to the Hogsmill River, whose banks were painted by the Pre-Raphaelites — it was here that John Everett Millais painted his famous "Ophelia". Nearby are Bourne Hall with its lake and museum, the great Nonsuch Park, on the site of Henry VIII's lost palace, the famous Epsom Downs racecourse, home of the Derby, and the North Downs and Surrey countryside, with central London a short distance to the north.

From a medieval church recorded since 1239, whose belltower still stands in the churchyard, through the building of Henry Clutton's Victorian church in 1848 with its medieval font and screen, its connection to Holman Hunt and "The Light of the World", and the fire of 1973 and its recovery, St Mary's Church gathers nearly eight centuries of Ewell's history into one building. A church at the heart of its village and the civic church of Epsom and Ewell, it remains the living parish church of St Mary the Virgin — a place of medieval and Victorian beauty, and of Pre-Raphaelite memory, in the Surrey village of Ewell.