IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Church Walk, STOWMARKET, IP14 1ET

A quiet backwater in the heart of the town, overlooking the churchyard.

A springtime view of the row of houses at the east end of the churchyard.

Cut Mark Stowmarket No 10 Station Road West NW face, N angle.

Looking from the west end of the nave towards the chancel. Anne Riches, in her 1982 supplement to Munro Cautley's guide to Suffolk Churches, notes that "even contemporaries found little to recommend in R.M. Phipson's restorations of 1864-65. It would seem to be an example of attempting to go back to the original state, sweeping away important later work and inevitably relying on speculation." Richard Makilwaine Phipson was the Norwich Diocesan architect. The pulpit to the south of the chancel arch was cobbled together by Phipson from the top stage of a Georgian three-decker and battered remnants of a 15th-century rood screen. It is complemented by the so-called Abbot's Tomb which fills the eastern bay of the north nave arcade, traditionally believed to contain the remains of one of the abbots of St Osyth in Essex who were pre-Reformation patrons of the living, but actually commemorating Margaret Tyrell of Gipping Hall, a member of the predominant local family who died in 1449. The organ, in its Victorian Gothic case with protruding pipes, was built by Hele of Plymouth in 1901 for Emmanuel Church in Paddington, and was brought to Stowmarket in 1993 to replace an earlier instrument apparently by Father Smith which had been purchased from Walsall in 1800. The original east window was destroyed in a gun-cotton explosion in 1875 and was replaced by the Birmingham glaziers Camm Bros. The walls were repainted in 2016 to create a lighter interior. www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/stowcofe.htm