St. Mary's Church, South Stoneham

St Mary's Church, South Stoneham, is one of only two surviving medieval churches in the city of Southampton — a precious Norman survival, often described as one of the city's best-kept secrets. Standing in a secluded and leafy position off Wessex Lane on the north-eastern edge of Southampton, almost hidden today among the buildings of a University of Southampton accommodation campus, the church preserves work from the twelfth century and earlier, including a chalk chancel arch and a Purbeck marble font of around 1180. Long the centre of a vast medieval parish, it remains a living Anglican church and a quiet jewel of the city's heritage.

The parish of South Stoneham was once enormous, covering more than eight thousand acres along the eastern side of the River Itchen, from the site of present-day Eastleigh in the north down to Northam Bridge, and taking in a string of ancient tithings. Curiously, there was never really a village of South Stoneham — only the church and a few houses — and the area is now part of the Southampton suburb of Swaythling. The church appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as the property of Richer the clerk, who held it, with two dependent churches near Southampton, of the Bishop of Winchester. By the sixteenth century it had become an "appropriation" of St Mary's Church in Southampton, and the right to appoint its clergy lay with the rector of that church until the early twentieth century. The expansion of Southampton in the late nineteenth century saw much of the great parish absorbed into neighbouring districts, and today South Stoneham forms part of the parish of Swaythling, whose principal church is St Alban's, built in 1933.

The building itself is a record in stone of more than eight centuries of work. Its earliest part is the chancel, whose chancel arch of chalk dates from the twelfth century, with a Perpendicular east window of the fifteenth; the nave is thirteenth-century, and the west tower late fifteenth. The chancel arch is a fine piece of Norman work, with detached jamb-shafts, hollow-fluted capitals and carved foliage, while in the north wall of the chancel a round-headed twelfth-century window survives, flanked by thirteenth-century lancets. The font, of Purbeck marble and dating from about 1180, has a square bowl carved with round-headed arches on each face — a characteristic example of late-Norman work.

The church was much altered in the Georgian and Victorian periods. The north transept was rebuilt in 1728 to house the grand baroque monument to Edmund Dummer, which is attributed to the great architect Nicholas Hawksmoor — who is also believed to have designed the nearby South Stoneham House. The Dummers were squires of Swaythling, and the church became the resting place of several generations of the family; their crypt lay beneath the church but, being prone to flooding from the nearby River Itchen, was filled in during the 1960s — local tradition holding that, when the river rose, "the Dummers could be heard jostling about beneath their feet". The south transept and the present west gallery were added during a reconstruction of 1854. The church also has a link with Sir Hans Sloane, the great collector whose collections founded the British Museum, for his wife Sarah is commemorated in the nave, the Sloane family having lived at South Stoneham House.

Among the church's many monuments are the royal arms of King Charles II, dated 1660, set over the chancel arch, and the tomb of Edmund Clerke, clerk to the Privy Seal, who died in 1632, shown kneeling with his wife Anne and their twelve children. The west tower, with its battlemented parapet and twin belfry lights, carries on its south face a sundial bearing the motto "So Flies Life Away. 1738", and holds a peal of three bells. Over the west doorway is a niche, probably once intended for a statue of the Virgin and Child. The churchyard is rich in eighteenth-century headstones carved with cherubs, skulls, urns and hourglasses, and its early-eighteenth-century north boundary wall, adjoining South Stoneham House, is separately listed at Grade II.

The church possesses several remarkable treasures. In the gallery is a small manual organ of 1857 by J. W. Walker & Sons, accompanied by a rare "dumb organist" of the same date — a mechanical device, one of only two or three known to exist, by which hymn tunes could be played by turning a handle. The church owns some of the finest church silver in Southampton, including a cup of 1630, a bible of 1572, and a shepherd's crook said to be more than three hundred years old, and it is home to the University of Southampton's portable campanile, a set of twelve bells cast in 1999.

In recent years the church has been the subject of a major restoration. A project launched in 2008, at a projected cost of £150,000, set out to undo the damage caused a century earlier when Victorian builders repointed the medieval stonework with hard cement mortar, which had trapped damp and cracked the stone; this was replaced with traditional lime mortar, beginning with the west tower and the roof, to preserve the ancient fabric for the future. The vicar described it then as "one of the two oldest churches in the area, a little gem, one of Southampton's best-kept secrets".

The church stands off Wessex Lane at Swaythling, on the north-eastern edge of Southampton, beside the River Itchen and close to South Stoneham House and the university's halls of residence. The Itchen Valley, the river's water meadows and walks, the University of Southampton, the parks and waterfront of the city, and the wider attractions of Southampton and the edge of the New Forest beyond are all within easy reach.

From its Norman origins and Domesday record, through its long history as the heart of a great medieval parish, its Georgian Hawksmoor monument and its Victorian rebuilding, to its careful modern restoration, St Mary's Church, South Stoneham, gathers more than eight centuries of Hampshire history into one building. A hidden medieval gem on the edge of Southampton, it remains a living church and one of the oldest and most precious in the city.