Norfolk Churches

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St Mark, Lakenham, Norwich

St Mark: Carpenter's Gothick

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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.

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.

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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