St Peter and St Paul's Church, Aldeburgh

The Church of St Peter and St Paul stands on rising ground above Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town whose name now rings around the musical world — for in this churchyard lies Benjamin Britten, the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, beside his partner the tenor Peter Pears, with the first woman doctor in England, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, resting nearby. Grade II* listed since 1950, the church gathers the whole story of its seafaring, music-making town.

A church at Aldeburgh, of probable Saxon foundation, was recorded in the Domesday Book. The oldest fabric now standing is the fourteenth-century tower of three stages with a polygonal stair turret; the rest of the building is a major Perpendicular Gothic rebuilding of the first half of the sixteenth century, carried out — remarkably — across the very years of the English Reformation: nave, north aisle and north chapel in 1525–29, south aisle and chapel in 1534–35, the south porch in 1539 and the chancel in 1545. The walls are typical East Anglian flint flushwork with ashlar dressings, and the unusual south porch adjoins the pavement with arches opening east and west, allowing processions to pass through the precinct. A west gallery was added by Robert Appleton in 1840, with Victorian restorations in 1870–71 by Henry Perkin and 1891 by Edward Bishop.

The font of about 1320 is the oldest fitting, its carved panels of angels and lions defaced in 1643 during William Dowsing's Puritan iconoclasm; fifteenth-century Suffolk poppyhead bench ends survive nearby. The octagonal wineglass pulpit of 1632, by John Garrard, is carved with fish and vine in high relief — fitting symbols for a fishing town. The monuments span the centuries: a neoclassical memorial with sarcophagus, female figure and angel to Lady Henrietta Vernon (died 1786) in the south chapel; a bust by Thomas Thurlow (1847) in the north aisle to the poet George Crabbe, Aldeburgh's native son and former curate here, whose poem "The Borough" gave Britten the story of Peter Grimes; and the town's war memorial, a part-gilded marble relief of a dying soldier by Gilbert Bayes, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1917.

The glass tells the same double story of faith and music. The east chancel window of the Crucifixion (1891) is attributed to Hardman & Co, and the Lady Chapel holds a 1929 window of St Anne teaching the infant Mary to read by Archibald Keightley Nicholson. Finest of all is the Benjamin Britten memorial window of 1980, designed by John Piper — Britten's long-time stage designer — and made by Patrick Reyntiens: across three lights it depicts the composer's three church parables of the 1960s, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son, glowing like banners above the church where their composer worshipped and now lies.

The churchyard's most moving monument predates them all: a large sculpted marble memorial to the seven RNLI lifeboatmen — John Butcher, Charles Crisp, Thomas Morris, Walter George Ward, Allan Arthur Easter, Herbert William Downing and James Miller Ward — who perished in the Aldeburgh lifeboat disaster of 7 December 1899, when their boat capsized in heavy seas during a rescue attempt. All seven lie in a single plot, each with his own cross-shaped marker facing the memorial and looking out to sea; a copper tablet inside the church remembers them too. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson rests in her family plot: the first woman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in England (1865), a champion of women's suffrage, and from 1908 — as Mayor of Aldeburgh — the first woman elected mayor in England. The soprano Joan Cross and the composer-conductor Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst's daughter and Britten's devoted assistant, complete the churchyard's extraordinary musical company.

The tower carries a ring of eight bells, all but one cast by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough in 1960–61, when the old six were restored and augmented and hung in a new iroko frame, rededicated on 18 June 1961. Members of the Suffolk Guild of Ringers ring three-hour peals most months — a practice robust enough to survive a 2008 noise complaint that was dismissed after debate in the House of Commons. St Peter and St Paul's remains Aldeburgh's active parish church, at its busiest each June when the Aldeburgh Festival that Britten founded fills the town with music once again.