Yesterday I went on a journey to see exactly what happens when a Victorian priest, with absolutely no architectural training, but a hell of a lot of money and hubris, looks out of his window one day and goes "I'm gonna build a MASSIVE church."

Please, join me.

Leamington Spa, as the name suggests, is a spa town, and, like many spa towns, went through a HUGE population boom after the spring was discovered and turned into a destination.

In 1801, before the spring was discovered, 315 people lived there. By 1901 the population was 26,888

A massive and rapid population boom caused huge problems at a time when almost everyone went to church, and the small medieval church in the town struggled to keep up.

When a new vicar arrived in 1839 he found a church that had been enlarged repeatedly, and was still too small.

The Vicar, Rev'd John Craig, decided he was going to build an ENORMOUS new church, and that he was going to design and project-manage the whole enterprise himself.

His proposed design was... extravagant

The new church is So Big, that during construction the old church tower was left standing, and used to prop up the scaffolding.

The internal ceiling of the Victorian church stands higher than the tower of the medieval original.

Welcome, my friends, to All Saints, Leamington Spa

Doesn't look much like John Craig's designs, does it?

Don't worry, we'll get to that.

Inside, upon first impression, All Saints is splendid. All height and light and vibrant stained glass.

I arrived early-ish in the morning, to catch the way the sunlight from the East casts great shards of colour across the choir stalls,

With her vast scale, and enormous windows, All Saints really is an embodiment of Victorian Splendour...

She's also A MESS.

Rev'd John Craig had No Idea what he was doing, and once you get past the sheer ambition and scale of the building, you can't help but wonder what on EARTH he was thinking.

Let's ignore the architecture, for a moment, and go back to basics.

John built his enormous expensive church out of Warwick Sandstone. Warwick Sandstone is soft and porous and altogether the worst stone you could choose.

How bad is it? This bad.

If lightly running your hands over the outside of the church is enough to dislodge a tiny shower of stone fragments, please imagine what nearly 200 years of English Weather has done.

See, the church might be massive and beautiful (if architecturally bizarre), but it's also falling apart.

There's great big cracks in the fabric of the building everywhere you look, and leaks everywhere else.

The only reason the church is still standing is because the enormous crossing tower (planned to be higher than Salisbury Cathedral) wasn't built.

Because, being untrained, John didn't build the piers strong enough to hold it, and it would have brought the whole church down.

There's signs of the planned tower everywhere you look, though. Most obviously, if you stand outside the church, you can see the weird flat-topped square over the crossing, that would have been the base of the tower.

John Craig died before he could finish building his wild church, and a professional architect was drafted in, years later, to build the last two bays of the nave (in a slightly different style), and the west front (with a single bell tower).

Snarky comments aside, All Saints is a beautiful space, and it's a shame she wasn't more competently constructed.

I also got to sneak into the Organ loft - I know nothing about Organs, and being inside one did nothing to demystify them.

There's just... a lot of pipes?

Anyway, All Saint's organ is being destroyed by a leaky roof, you can donate to help fix it here: http://www.allsaintschurchleamington.org.uk/organ-roof.html 

Another problem All Saints has, aside from the cracks, and the leaks, and the church organ, and the Literal Stone Used To Construct It, is their windows - not only are many of the panes damaged, but see how wavy the leading is on that glass? Yeah. That's not supposed to happen.

The glass is generic, but kinda nice all the same - I even got a close-up of some saints toes for you freaky internet people.

So the answer to the question: what happens when a Victorian priest, with absolutely no architectural training, but a hell of a lot of money and hubris, looks out of his window one day and goes "I'm gonna build a MASSIVE church" is: the massive church almost falls down constantly

Still, she's an excellent church to lie down in, and that bumps her up the rankings in my book.

As previously mentioned, if you want to donate to help stop All Saints from falling down, you can do so here - they're currently trying to stop the roof falling in on the organ: http://www.allsaintschurchleamington.org.uk/organ-roof.html 

If you liked this thread and want to send me a tip you can do so at http://ko-fi.com/jayhulme  or you can support me more regularly on Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/jayhulme  and you can find more church adventures here: https://twitter.com/JayHulmePoet/status/1294387410642579456