St Michael and All Angels Church, Southwick

St Michael and All Angels Church is the Anglican parish church of Southwick, the harbour town in the Adur district of West Sussex, and its story includes one of the strangest episodes of any English parish church in the Second World War: a tower wrecked by an unexploded bomb, dismantled stone by numbered stone — and rebuilt exactly as it was. Grade II* listed, the church combines Saxon, Norman and medieval work with Victorian and post-war rebuilding.

The site is anciently settled: the Romans built a large villa nearby which remained in use for nearly three hundred years until the fourth century, and development only resumed in the late Saxon era. The name "Southwick" first appears in 1073, when the settlement formed part of the large manor of Kingston Buci — possibly founded as a Celtic estate — and a Saxon church, probably wooden, stood on the present site perhaps as early as the tenth century, before the settlement even took its name. By the Domesday survey of 1086 a stone church was in place, almost certainly controlled by St Julian's Church at Kingston Buci, since Southwick was not identified separately in the survey. In the late twelfth century or 1225 (sources differ) the advowson was conveyed to the Knights Templar — already patrons of the famous church at nearby Sompting — passing around 1365 to the Knights Hospitaller, and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the Crown.

The eleventh-century church had a nave, chancel and west tower, and the lowest stage of the tower, with the entrance doorway, survives from that era — above the door the roofline of the original church can still be discerned, and some eleventh-century flintwork remains around the entrance. The middle and upper stages, once thought Saxon too, are now dated to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, when the rest of the church was also rebuilt: the nave was renewed with a south aisle and chapel, and the chancel remodelled twice, around 1130 and again in the thirteenth century when its lancet windows were inserted. A chancel arch — built of clunch, the chalky stone common in Sussex — and a wooden screen followed in the fourteenth century, and a porch stood by the early seventeenth century. A fourteenth-century aumbry survives in the chancel's north wall.

Fire destroyed the nave and roof in 1830, sparing chancel and tower, and the architect John Garrett designed the present four-bay nave with lean-to north and south aisles, rounded arches and lancet windows in groups of three; a vestry and a replacement south chapel followed later in the century, along with memorial windows in the aisles, a churchyard extension and, in 1908, a lychgate. The chancel lancets received stained glass by Charles Eamer Kempe in their Victorian restoration, and the east window's glass may be by Clayton and Bell.

Then came the night of 21 February 1941, when a German bomb struck the church. It did not explode — but it tore through the tower and wrecked it. A bomb disposal unit dug extensively without finding the device, and ordered the structurally unsound tower demolished so they could widen the search. Because of its historical value, the tower was taken down stone by stone, each one numbered and stored for future restoration. Two years later, in January 1943, the bomb was finally found embedded beneath the churchyard by the outside wall of the north aisle; it was removed, defused — and, with admirable Sussex sangfroid, put on display inside the church for a time. After the war the War Damage Commission paid for the rebuilding, and in 1949 the architect John Denman executed a precise re-erection of all three stages and the broached, shingled spire from the numbered stones and timbers, adding round-walled vestries on both sides of the tower.

The church is built of flint with stone dressings under roofs of flat tiles and pantiles. Inside are the nave and aisles, the south chapel (now housing the organ, restored in the mid-1970s), the chancel with its restored Norman arch, an elaborately carved pulpit incorporating early seventeenth-century panels, and a substantial square font believed to be thirteenth-century. A memorial window of about 1950 in the north aisle, by Ken Adams of the Hove firm Cox & Barnard, shows the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple — fitting post-war glass for a church that was itself presented anew, stone by faithful stone. St Michael's was listed Grade II* on 19 July 1950, and remains the parish church of Southwick.