London Colney

Two churches and a convent chapel - St Peter and Our Lady of Walsingham were both LNK and All Saints is redundant and awaiting conversion for modern usage.

St Peter looks like a URC building, Our Lady an extravagantly ugly aircraft hanger (I have no idea how it got on the list) but All Saints is rather splendid and I would have loved to have seen inside.

ST PETER. By George Smith. A lean, cemented facade in the Rundhogenstil, with vaguely transitional Norman detail. The date is 1825, that is remarkably early for a Norman Revival. Aisleless interior. W gallery on thin cast—iron columns with Norman Capitals. The STAINED GLASS of the E windows was designed by Ruskin’s friend the Dowager Marchioness of Waterford and made by Hughes in 1865. It represents the Ascension in a broad pictorial, somewhat Raphaelesque, style.

ALL SAINTS CONVENT. Begun in 1899 by Leonard Stokes. A fine, very freely Neo-Tudor front, with much picturesque; original detail and yet strong and honest. Red brick, purple brick, and stone. The centre motif is a gatehouse with a figure frieze above the door. The l. and r. halves are only broadly symmetrical. They have several bay windows. To the r. the main front ends with a turret, and after that follows the lower Refectory with a large dais window. The style is similar to Stokes’s later work for Emanuel College, Cambridge. - There is an equally fine cloistered garth inside. The CHAPEL was added in 1927 by Comper. It is yet unfinished. It consists so far of three bays of pale brick with tall pointed windows in which Perp and E.E. motifs are mixed. The interior is white, with the large baldacchino as the one all-dominating element (tall golden columns with curious little flowers painted on and a crocketed ogee top), a most surprising combination of the Italian and the English. The choir stalls also have slim Tuscan columns and yet little buttresses. Tree of Jesse glass in the E window. The extraordinary harmony of the interior is due to the fact that Comper directed everything from the baldacchino to the candle sconces on the walls, the candlesticks on the altar, and even the size and type of the candles.

St Peter

Our Lady of Walsingham

All Saints

The third in a row missed by Mee.

Flickr.