The Parish Church of St Giles, Graffham

St Giles' Church sits at the end of a lane beneath the steep wooded scarp of the South Downs, serving the West Sussex village of Graffham. It is one of those churches whose modest size belies the magnitude of the names attached to it: a future cardinal served as its rector, and the church as it stands is a memorial to Samuel Wilberforce, the most famous bishop of Victorian England — built by G. E. Street, one of the era's greatest architects.

A church at Graffham was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and the oldest surviving record of its layout, from the late twelfth century, describes a chancel and a nave with arcaded north and south aisles; a tower followed in the thirteenth century. A diocesan survey of 1817 found the building structurally "in good order". Its Victorian destiny arrived through marriage: Samuel Wilberforce, son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, became Lord of the Manor through his marriage to Emily Sargent, daughter of the rector John Sargent, and made nearby Lavington Park his home. His brother-in-law Henry Edward Manning, a curate in the parish, succeeded as rector in 1833 — and went on to one of the most extraordinary careers in English religious history, converting to Roman Catholicism in 1851 and rising to be Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

Wilberforce himself became Bishop of Oxford in 1845 (and later of Winchester), appointing George Edmund Street as his diocesan architect in 1850. In 1857 he commissioned Street to restore Graffham's medieval church, though nothing was done at the time. The project was revived under sadder circumstances: in 1873 Wilberforce was killed in a riding accident, and Street was engaged to rebuild the church as his memorial. The work cost £2,885, and the rebuilt church was rededicated on All Saints' Sunday 1875 at a service attended by Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury. Street had retained the original tower, but in 1885 — four years after the architect's own death — it was found to be unsafe, and his son Arthur Edmund Street rebuilt it, carefully reinserting the medieval west doorway; the shingled spire followed in 1889. (The bishop's grave, it should be said, lies not here but at St Peter's Church on the Lavington estate nearby.)

The result is Early English Gothic Revival of high quality, its "crisp" and "robust" exterior built of hand-knapped flints of an unusually dark colour, dressed with ashlar — yet the church retains, in the judgment of architectural historians, "an air of antiquity". That is partly because real antiquity survives within. Two of the three arches of the south arcade are twelfth-century originals, with circular piers, single-chamfered pointed arches and scalloped capitals akin to those of other medieval churches nearby; only the easternmost arch is Victorian. The west doorway, with its intricate Early English detailing, is the sole surviving external feature of the medieval church. The doorway between chancel and north vestry, reset in the rebuilding, is fifteenth-century and carries a wonderfully eccentric survival: a lock and bolts with moveable knobs carved as the heads of a king and a queen in a horned headdress — though Pevsner's guide reads the second head as a bishop. The font is a plain cylindrical tub of the early Norman period, of a type shared with the nearby downland churches of Didling, Selham and Woolbeding, and most of the timbers in the king-post roof are ancient. The rebuilt tower holds three bells: one fifteenth-century, and two cast in 1621 and 1642.

St Giles' was listed at Grade II on 18 June 1959. Inside, a stone war memorial tablet honours twenty-five men of this small parish who fell in the First World War and nine in the Second; the churchyard holds the Commonwealth War Graves of Sergeant Cyril Ambrose Snook of the RAF and Private Edwin Walter Whitcher of the Royal Sussex Regiment, both of whom died in 1918, along with the grave of Sir Geoffrey Hirst Bateman (1906–1998), surgeon and Olympic fencer. The church remains the active Church of England parish church of Graffham, its dark flint walls holding together nine centuries of village faith and one of the great clerical dynasties of the nineteenth century.