Building record 0417000000 - ST MARY'S CHURCH, WESTCOTT

Erected 1867 by Richard, Duke of Buckingham and Chandos to G E Street's designs. Chancel, nave, N and S aisles, bell-turret. Chapel of Ease to Waddesdon (B1).
Built on site of 2 cottages on former village green (B2).
Street's best work in Bucks (further detail)(B3).
Marked at NGR (B4).
Grade II+. Parish church. 1867. By G.E. Street. Coursed rubble stone exterior with stone dressings, coped gables and tiled roofs. Interior lined with pale red and yelllow brick but has some stone dressings. Nave, short narrow aisles, chancel. Austere in style with plate tracery. Nave has moulded sill course and uncusped traceried windows, 3-light to W., 2 bays of 2-light windows to N. and S. Central bellcote with pyramidal tile roof and cast iron cross. One clerestory window to S. with 4-light cusped wooden window in gabled dormer. S. door with chamfered arch in gabled porch. S. aisle to east of porch has 2 small quatrefoil windows and 2-light window with cusped tracery at E. end. Similar 2-light windows to E. and W. ends of N. aisle. Both aisles share same roof pitch as nave. Chancel has off-set buttresses and windows with cusped tracery, 2-light to S., 3-light to E. Interior has unmoulded arches on circular piers with simply shaped caps, the N. arcade of 3 bays, the S. arcade of 2. Chancel arch similar but with attached shafts. Contemporary fittings with stone pulpit, low stone screen, and octofoil font. Mid C20 glass in E. window (B5).
Built 1866-7 for the Dule of Buckingham & Chandos. For sheer boldness of invention and Street's excited use of geometry, St Mary's is unsurpassed among his village churches. The chancel, faced with local limestone and covered with red tiles like the rest of the church, is fairly straightforward and has typical Geometrical tracery. Yet some personality can be detected in the stepping up of the stringcourse for the sanctuary zone and the way in which it holds the corner buttresses in check below.But the drama comes with the nave and its roof, which sweeps down in catslide fashion over the narrow aisles. On the south (the show façade) the aisle is stopped off by and is flush with the porch, beyond which the nave continues on its own. Other individual features are the little circular windows pierced in the aisle wall, a large timber dormer under a brick-filled gable to light the east part of the nave, and the tiny bell-turret halfway along the nave ridge. Inside, the first surprise is that the walls are faced with two-tone pink bricks and they are pierced by aracades of rudimentary power: low circular piers belling out to square bases for unchamfered, unmoulded arches with no hood. At the ends there are not even any responds. The chancel arch, however, is supplied woth nook-shafts and a hood. 'Otherwise', as Paul Joyce notes, 'everything comes aslogic directs: plain rafter roofs, plain stone pulpit, and straightforward furnishings' (B6).