Here we are again sweeping for the Bishop of Chelmsford and we are quite some way from home, sweeping the Rectory at Rawreth. The rectory itself is a modern 1960’s house with a lined chimney. It was nice and easy to sweep with brush and rods, and not particularly dirty, so it allowed us a little time to look at the church which was just over the road.

This is an interesting church, because it was substantially rebuilt and refurnished in the early 1880s to the designs of Father Ernest Geldart who we have met before at a number of Essex churches, but most notably at the one where he was rector for many years, Little Braxted. The tower was retained along with the arcades. All the furnishings were designed by Geldart, and even the stained glass and mosaics, which were made for him as usual by the firm of Cox, Sons & Buckley.

Geldart is interesting because he used medieval forms more commonly found in non-ecclesiastical buildings to create worship spaces for extremely high Anglo-Catholic liturgy. That tradition has gone here now, but the fixtures and fittings survive – just. A few years after Geldart’s restoration the earthquake caused considerable damage, and then there was blast damage in WWII. There was a massive restoration 1986-90 which cost £75,000, but already the south chancel wall is collapsing, and the floor of the sanctuary breaking up, all the tiles coming loose. It is hard to see how they will rescue it. There are murmurings of redundancy, but I suspect that it simply isn’t a significant enough church for the CCT to take it on. Thoughts provoked, we left the narrow band of countryside and, re-entering urban sprawl, came to Wickford.