St Mary's Church, Hinckley

St Mary's Parish Church is the oldest building in Hinckley, standing at the centre of the Leicestershire town whose name itself is Anglo-Saxon — "Hinck" a personal name, "ley" a meadow. An Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Leicester and a Grade II* listed building, it was dedicated in the Middle Ages to the Assumption of St Mary the Virgin, and a church has stood on the site for some nine hundred years — perhaps far longer, for the remnants of an Anglo-Saxon sundial are visible on the diagonal buttress at the south-east corner of the chancel, and F. C. Bedford's 1936 guide records the general agreement among historians that a Saxon church once existed in Hinckley.

The documented founder was William FitzOsbern, who came over with William the Conqueror. He granted the church's income to the Abbey of Lyre in Normandy, a connection that continued intermittently until 1415, when the revenue passed finally to the Priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire — the history behind the name of Mount Grace High School on Leicester Road, built on land once owned by the church. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1542, he gave Mount Grace's former Hinckley estates and the patronage of St Mary's to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, who kept the right to appoint the vicar until 1874, when it passed to the Bishop of Peterborough; when Leicester became a separate diocese in 1926, the Bishop of Leicester took it over and remains patron to this day. A Benedictine priory was also founded in Hinckley in the eleventh century, on the south side of the church where St Mary's Church Community Hall now stands; the old priory building survived until 1827, when it was demolished for cottages — Hunter's Row — themselves demolished in 1912.

The present church was rebuilt in the thirteenth century; a beam found during the Victorian rebuilding bore the date 1246, and the oldest parts of the building — the tower, nave and chancel — date roughly from 1240 to 1400. The outstanding feature is the early fourteenth-century tower, 25.3 metres tall with walls 1.7 metres thick, supported by eight four-stage buttresses paired at the angles, crowned with battlements and angle pinnacles, and topped by a spire rising a further 30.5 metres — visible for miles around. The large west window was added in the fifteenth century. A stone winding staircase at the tower's south-east corner climbs to the battlements, with a splendid view over the town and as far as Coventry. The spire itself was erected in 1788, replacing one badly damaged by storms and lightning two years earlier; its copper weathercock, made for the new spire in 1788 and inscribed with the name of the vicar John Cole Galloway, is 63.5 centimetres high, weighs five kilograms, and was regilded in 1994.

The great Victorian restoration of 1875–78, under the architect Ewan Christian, cost £10,000 — the equivalent of millions today. The vicar of the day, the Reverend W. H. Disney, served ten exhausting years at Hinckley and opened the account of his ministry in his 1898 autobiography with the words: "My health is now broken. The nervous system gave way under the strain of ten years' unceasing work in a manufacturing town in Leicestershire"; a plaque on the south wall of the chancel remembers him. The restoration demolished the old north and south aisles and transepts, along with the great west singing gallery of 1723 — which projected two bays eastward — and the side galleries, into the north one of which the poor had once been herded onto benches seating 360. New, larger aisles and transepts were built, giving seating for 1,200 on oak pews, each transept with its own door so the children could come and go without disturbing the congregation. The chancel was restored and re-roofed in 1880. Unhappily, much of the Victorians' stone was of poor quality, and it has had to be replaced over the years: the top twelve feet of the spire were completely rebuilt in 1993–94, when the south-west pinnacle was renewed and the north stone spitter — the spout that throws water clear of the tower — was carved underneath with a likeness of the vicar; the vestry's south-east buttress was underpinned in 1998–99, the upper east wall of the Lady Chapel rebuilt in 1999, and crumbling stonework in the north aisle replaced in 2006, with the whole interior redecorated, at a cost of about £35,000.

The church's proportions are its most remarkable feature: it is almost a square. The total length including chancel and tower is 38.4 metres, yet the nave is only 19.1 metres long while the nave and aisles together are 21.7 metres wide — 31.7 including the transepts — with a chancel only 11.9 by 5.5 metres. Perhaps the finest architectural feature is the early fourteenth-century tower arch: four-centred, its upper curves very flat, without capitals, with ribs at each angle running unbroken from floor to apex. The medieval rood screen was destroyed at the Reformation, though the original thirteenth-century winding stone stair to the rood loft survives, its steps never restored and deeply worn; the present screen was erected in 1905 as a memorial to Queen Victoria at a cost of £250, with the crucifix and figures of St Mary and St John added in 1931. The font, part of the 1875–78 restoration and moved to its present position in 1888, has a circular bowl on four piers with marble shafts, carved with the words of Jesus: "Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not." The North Chapel has been converted into a coffee bar — the church's medieval fabric serving twenty-first-century hospitality.

The stained glass includes the church's favourite window, the Nativity in the side chapel, created by Burlison and Grylls in 1919 — showing a very English-looking golden-haired Mary and well-trimmed shepherds, one said to resemble George V — along with the Annunciation by Mayer & Co of about 1890, the Resurrection window of 1925 by Christopher Webb in memory of Elizabeth and Margaret Yeomans, and windows at the west end of the south aisle remembering Herbert Clark, chairman of the Sketchley Dye Works, and his wife Edith.

Music runs deep at St Mary's, which today boasts an organ, two worship bands and numerous choirs, including a traditional robed choir and gospel choirs. The first organ, built in 1808 by George Pike England — son of the famous builder George England — stood in the east gallery with three keyboards, 21 stops and 1,370 pipes but no pedal board, costing £525. Rebuilt on the south side of the chancel in the Victorian restoration, it was replaced in 1908 by a Norman and Beard instrument of 37 stops and over 2,000 pipes, electrified in 1966. By the 1990s that organ needed restoration beyond its worth, and it gave way to an organ from the redundant church of St Paul's, Kirby Road, Leicester, containing original Brindley & Foster pipework; installed by Roger Fifield of Leamington Spa and completed in 2005, it has 43 speaking stops and about 2,500 pipes. The tower holds one of the finest peals of bells in the county: five were first cast at the start of the seventeenth century, and all eight were recast in 1925, the heaviest weighing 1.12 tonnes — still rung every Sunday morning, with practice on Monday evenings. The clock, installed by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon in 1876, strikes the Westminster Quarters on four bells, and the clock room holds a treasure: a carillon operating like a giant musical box, its mahogany barrel 1.22 metres long, playing a different tune each day — three original tunes survive, including a Handel hymn, the National Anthem and Highland Laddie — restored along with the clock in 2016. Nine centuries after FitzOsbern, the meadow town's church still sings.