Knebworth - St Martin

I was disappointed to find St Martin closed but with a notice implying it's normally open. It was closed last week due to local schools taking part in an Easter journey - mmmmmm.

The disappointment lies in this being a Lutyens church and he designed very few religious buildings, fewer still were actually built and none of them was finished to his original designs. Best known are the two churches at Hampstead Garden Suburb (started c. 1909) and his aborted Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathedral. St Martin’s, Knebworth is chronologically between the Hampstead churches and Liverpool Cathedral and so has been seen as a part of the development process that led to the design of the Cathedral.

ST MARTIN. In New Knebworth, on the A1 road. One of Lutyens’s most remarkable churches. Red brick with stone dressings. No tower, but excessively far projecting roof eaves. So far of the three bays of the nave only one has been built. The aisle separated from the nave by little arches on Tuscan columns, three arches per bay. Big and high transepts, two bays deep. Between the two, separating the transepts from the crossing, one colossal Tuscan column on each side, deliberately dwarfing those of the arcades of the aisles. Similar small arcades on the outer sides of the transepts. Bare chancel and apse. The interior is all white with a timber ceiling supported by the walls and the two giant transept columns.

Knebworth. Modern Knebworth on the Great North Road has a church on the hillside, reached by an avenue of limes, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with great eaves overhanging the brick walls, and an unusual interior with many pillars and arches, two huge pillars at the crossing reaching to the roof.

Flickr.