Landscove

English Church Architecture.

LANDSCOVE, St. Matthew (SX 774 664),

DEVON.

(Bedrock: Middle Devonian, Torbay Group.)

A modest church by one of the foremost Victorian church architects,

John Loughborough Pearson (1817-97).

Born in Brussels but raised from a young age in Durham, John Loughborough Pearson was the tenth and last child of Ann and William Pearson, a painter of landscapes who regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy and who probably ensured his young son was exposed to the visual arts as he grew up, even if, as it appears, the younger Pearson's formal education was very limited (Anthony Quiney, John Loughborough Pearson, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 5). By the age of fourteen, it was certainly clear he could draw however, and his father obtained a pupillage for him with Ignatius Bonomi (1787-1870), a well-respected architect of Italian origins, practising in the city, who, over the next ten years, ensured Pearson acquired a thorough training in all aspects of the profession, until September 1841, when Bonomi announced he was going to form a partnership with a young man of his acquaintance, and Pearson promptly left, probably feeling he had been unfairly passed over. A hiatus then ensued in Pearson's career, followed by a year or thereabouts, during which he worked, in turn, for Anthony Salvin and Philip Hardwick in London. But Pearson was able to build up his own individual clients and commissions during that time, and a point was soon reached where he had a viable church building practice of his own. (Quiney, pp. 7-18).

Pearson was a devout churchman throughout his entire life, but although he joined the trenchant Ecclesiological Society, there is little evidence that he shared that Society's dogmatic Anglo-Catholic views, being, in all likelihood, of a latitudinarian persuasion. His architecture is less intense than that of his High Church confrères and with a few conspicuous exceptions, his buildings are not notable for the structural polychromy that was all the rage in the third quarter of the nineteenth century especially, but rather for an ingenious use of internal space, which was his supreme accomplishment. Pearson could design a vault for almost any space, however awkward, and largely as a result, many of his churches are distinguished by their interesting internal perspectives. His generally relaxed manner and churchmanship did not suit everybody, however, and sometimes he was replaced, after having been appointed to a job initially, by a more thrusting competitor - most notably Street.

This early creation by Pearson seems surprisingly large for such an out-of-the-way spot. It was erected in 1849-51 at the expense of Mrs. Champernowne, the former owner of Dartington Hall, who paid about altogether £3,000 (notes in the church). Pevsner described the design as 'Not at all Devonian' in the original Devon volume of The Buildings of England (Penguin, 1952), which is true, perhaps, of its features (perhaps most notably, the broach spire) but fails to acknowledge the building’s vernacular construction materials, consisting in the main of attractive Middle Devonian, grey-green Penn Recca slate, dug less than a mile away at Thornecroft and laid here at random, with squared blocks tumbled in around the window heads, and with cleaved slabs for the roofs. Indeed, it was for the very workers of this slate quarry, which finally closed in 1908 (Staverton village website), that the church was commissioned.

St. Matthew’s comprises a nave and a chancel, with an independently-gabled S. aisle, a S. porch, and a tower to the southeast. Windows are mostly two-light with trefoil-cusping and various geometrical shapes (trefoils, quatrefoils and sexfoils) encircled in the heads. The chancel east window (illustrated right) is five-light, with outer lights subarcuated in pairs above quatrefoils in circles and a wheel containing three encircled sexfoils in the head. The tower rises in two stages to bell-openings with trefoiled lights separated by shafts; the spire is lit by three tiers of gabled lucarnes and there is a projecting stair turret in the re-entrant between the tower and the chancel, rising to the bell-stage.

The interior of the building, constructed of pale limestone, is relatively plain anddoes not need illustrating. The arcade is formed of three double-flat-chamfered arches springing from responds and piers alternately octagonal and circular. However, one curious point to notice is the fact that the church is aligned almost due north - a disorientating experience on a sunny day until one consciously begins to make allowance for it.

[Other churches by Pearson featured on this web-site are Dartington in Devon, Broomfleet, North Ferriby, Scorborough and South Dalton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Daylesford in Gloucestershire, Appleton-le-Moors in North Yorkshire, and Wentworth in Rotherham Metropolitan Borough.]