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St Mark,
Lakenham, Norwich A charming
aspect to the city of Norwich is that the parishes
outside of the city walls are still termed 'villages',
even if, like Lakenham, they have been a part of the
urban area for centuries. Lakenham lies to the south-west
of Conesford, the medieval southern suburb within the
walls, and today Lakenham is virtually an inner-city
area.
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St Mark lies at the city
centre end of Lakenham, a chapel of ease to the
medieval parish church of St John in the heart of
the old village centre a mile or so away. Its
nearest medieval neighbour is actually St John
Sepulchre within the city walls, barely 200
metres off, and when the suburbs expanded and St
Mark was built it spelt the beginning of the end
for St John Sepulchre and the other Conesford
churches. St Mark was
an early work of the Diocesan Architect John
Brown. Built in the 1840s when the first great
wave of the Anglican revival was just beginning
to make its way from Oxford, its style, although
obstensibly Perpendicular, is largely
pre-Ecclesiological; more 'Carpenter's Gothick'
than Gothic revival. The practice came back
twenty years later and added the apse; before
this, the chancel-less church must have seemed
very blockish and Evangelical.
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I have no idea what St Mark is like inside,
because I have never found it open, but Marguerite
Philips tells me that it is now open on Wednesdays
between midday and 2pm. I am also told that it has a fine
Art Nouveau screen.
Simon Knott, January 2006
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