St Mary's Church, Nottingham

St Mary's Church, Nottingham, formally the Church of St Mary the Virgin, is the oldest parish church in Nottingham and the civic church of the city, standing on High Pavement at the heart of the historic Lace Market, which gives it its familiar name of St Mary's in the Lace Market. Grade I listed as a building of outstanding architectural and historic interest, one of only five such buildings in the entire city, and a member of the Major Churches Network, it is a great Perpendicular church of cathedral-like scale, 215 feet from west to east, 100 feet across the transepts, its tower rising 126 feet above the old town. Its fame reaches even into legend: in the medieval ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk, preserved in a manuscript of about 1450, Robin comes to hear Mass at St Mary's and is arrested by the Sheriff in the porch, and D. H. Lawrence set a scene of Sons and Lovers in the church.

A church stood here long before the present building. St Mary's appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 and is believed to have Saxon origins, and the building seen today is at least the third on the site. From 1108 until 1538 the church belonged to Lenton Priory, whose monks held the living as rector and appointed a vicar to perform the daily offices. The great rebuilding began at the end of the reign of Edward III and continued to that of Henry VII: the south aisle wall was probably the first part raised in the early 1380s, the remainder of the nave and the transepts followed in the early fifteenth century, the nave was complete before 1475, and the tower was finished in the reign of Henry VIII. The result is remarkable for the uniformity of its Perpendicular Gothic style, a single sustained architectural idea carried through a century of building. One precious fragment of the earliest campaign survives: the chantry door, dating from the 1370s or 1380s, is considered the oldest surviving door in Nottingham, complete with its medieval iron locking mechanism, preserved because it hung internally and saw little use; the little chantry room behind it has served over the centuries as a bonehouse, a coal store and a chair store.

The church gathered the life of the town around it. In 1513 Dame Agnes Mellers founded the Free School of the Town of Nottingham within the church, the institution that became Nottingham High School; her foundation deed required a commemoration service on the Feast of the Translation of St Richard of Chichester, and apart from the Goose Fair this remains the most ancient ceremonial event still kept in the city. In 1649 George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, was imprisoned in Nottingham after interrupting the preacher at St Mary's, a famous episode in early Quaker history. The Bluecoat School, founded in 1706, taught its first lessons in the church porch, and from 1716 until at least 1770 the west end of the nave housed the town fire engine. The parish opened a workhouse at the south end of Mansfield Road in 1726 and ran it until 1834, when workhouses passed to the secular Boards of Guardians; the building was demolished in 1895 to make way for Nottingham Victoria railway station. The parish also made quiet history in religious education and practice: in 1751 it opened the first Sunday School, teaching reading, writing and arithmetic alongside religious knowledge to children unable to attend day school, thirty-five years before Robert Raikes's celebrated school at Gloucester, and it was at St Mary's around 1760 that the laying on of hands by the bishop at confirmation was first observed, performed by John Gilbert, Archbishop of York, and documented by Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol. As Nottingham grew into a great industrial town, more than a dozen new parishes were carved from St Mary's between 1822 and 1903, from St Paul's on George Street to St Bartholomew's on Blue Bell Hill Road.

The fabric has been renewed again and again. William Hiorne of Warwick rebuilt the west front in the Classical style in 1762, and William Stretton restored the south aisle and replaced the crossing vault around 1818-20. By 1843 the tower was in danger of collapse and was saved by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, after which the church closed for five years while George Gilbert Scott restored the roofs and returned the west front to Gothic, a £9,000 campaign completed when the Bishop of Lincoln, John Kaye, presided at the reopening on 19 May 1848. Scott and William Bonython Moffatt continued the internal restoration through the 1860s, and Scott reroofed the chancel in 1872. George Frederick Bodley added the chapter house in 1890, Temple Lushington Moore the Lady Chapel in 1912, and the Simpson memorial choir vestry followed in 1940. The exterior was cleaned and restored in 1992-93, and twenty-first-century works have fitted the medieval building for modern use: new kitchens and facilities in 2008, underfloor heating beneath a new stone floor in 2013, and the repair of the south transept with a new west porch in 2024.

The church's treasures span seven centuries. The octagonal medieval font carries a palindromic Greek inscription, ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ, "wash my transgressions, not only my face", reading the same in both directions. A battered alabaster tomb fragment portrays the rare image of a lily crucifix, and a panel of Nottingham alabaster, the city's great medieval export, depicts Archbishop Thomas Becket. The late Victorian stained glass is by celebrated makers including Kempe, Burlison and Grylls, and Hardman and Company, and the reredos above the altar is by Charles Edgar Buckeridge. Most striking of all are the bronze doors designed in 1904 by Henry Wilson in memory of his father-in-law, the Reverend Francis Morse, vicar of St Mary's: in the tympanum the Virgin supports and cherishes the body of Christ within a vesica, flanked by the gates of Death and Life through which the dove of the spirit enters weary and issues strong-winged, while the ten relief panels across the two leaves tell the life of Christ from the Annunciation at the Virgin's window to the Resurrection, where the Saviour emerges still bound in grave clothes as the birds sing at the coming of a new dawn, with Adam and Eve standing conscious of the fall beneath a cross of branching vine.

Among those buried in the church are mayors of Nottingham from John Samon in 1416 and Thomas Thurland in 1473, the first and second Earls of Clare of the Holles family, the fifth Earl of Meath, Thomas Berdmore, dentist to George III, and George Africanus, the African-born entrepreneur who became one of Nottingham's most notable citizens and died in 1834. The tower holds a ring of twelve bells; the first recorded clock was installed by Richard Roe of Epperstone in 1707 and later moved to Staunton church, its successor of 1807 was by Thomas Hardy of Nottingham, and the present clock of 1936 by George and Francis Cope was that firm's first electric auto-wind mechanism. In May 2022 the swinging of the bells was found to have strained the tower's supporting timbers and ringing was suspended for structural repairs costed at some £185,000; the funds were raised and the bells pealed specially for the coronation of King Charles III in 2023, scaffolding still supporting the masonry.

St Mary's today carries a wide ministry. It is the civic church of Nottingham, where the election of the town mayor once took place, and the university church for the University of Nottingham, hosting annual services for schools and organisations across the city alongside a busy programme of concerts and public performances. Worship keeps a dignified traditional character: the principal services are sung by a robed choir using both the Book of Common Prayer and Common Worship, the traditional liturgical colours are retained, and the Eucharist is sometimes still celebrated at the high altar ad orientem, priest and people facing east together. The assistant curacy carries the ancient title of Lecturer, revived in 1975 after falling into disuse in the seventeenth century. There are three choral services each week, and the choir performs in concert with the church's resident orchestra, the Orchestra of the Restoration, with organ and choral scholarships for students in higher education. The organ, by Marcussen and Søn of Denmark, installed in 1973 under the organist David Butterworth, is a neo-classical instrument of twenty-five speaking stops, small for so vast a church but of the highest quality. Around it, the warehouses of the Lace Market that once crowded the parish have become one of Nottingham's most atmospheric quarters, with the medieval church that watched the town's whole history still standing at its heart.