Ayot St Peter

Simon Jenkins gives St Peter, locked with keyholders listed (who were out when I visited), two stars and says "The interior is a delightful variant on late Victorian Gothic, thanks to its modest size and rich Arts and Crafts furnishings....Everywhere Ayot St Peter glories in colour. There is colour in the painted organ pipes, the chancel floor tiles and roof panels with paintings of saints and angels. The undistinguished stained glass (some of it by Seddon himself) is not obtrusive."

At the time I was unimpressed by the exterior and not particularly disappointed about not gaining access, now I'm not so sure. As an aside the setting must compete for the most picturesque in Herts.

ST PETER. 1875, by Seddon. Red brick with blue brick decoration and stone dressings. Asymmetrically placed thin tower with broaches connecting the square with an octagonal upper stage on which rests a spire. Clock with fancifully designed face in a shade of blue. Nave and apsed chancel plus a polygonally projecting S organ chamber. Corresponding to this on the N side a large rose window on the ground floor flanked by lancets. It is all very capricious and deliberately original. The interior is an exceptionally complete example of church furnishing about 1880 by an architect in sympathy with the then recent Arts and Crafts tendencies: chancel arch, an early work of the Marzin Brothers, who had their pottery at Southall from 1873 to 1915, thin iron chancel screen, elaborate tiling of the chancel, font with mosaic-work on the circular bowl. - STAINED GLASS in the W window (1880) designed by Seddon and incompetently executed, in the apse windows (1879) by an unknown glass artist. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten of c. 1640-50.

Ayot St Peter. The nightingales love the woods round this hill-top village; there is a green dotted with old trees and a 19th-century church which has surrounded itself with yet more trees of all kinds, a silver birch shimmering among the sombre evergreens. The church’s iron screen and stone pulpit with five saints are modern. In the park of Ayot Place is a timber-and-plaster farmhouse with a tiled roof and twisted chimneys, and in its hall is part of a crested roof beam decorated in classical design, and the date 1615 on a frieze of family shields to tell us when this Jacobean house was finished.

Flickr.