Church of St Michael the Greater, Stamford
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The Church of St Michael the Greater is a late-Georgian Gothic church in Stamford, Lincolnshire, which stands on the south side of Stamford High Street on the site of a Medieval predecessor. The church is a Grade II listed building[1] as, separately, is the churchyard wall. The building has been converted for commercial use.
It was called St Michael the Greater to distinguish it from ‘St Michael in Cornstall’, a church elsewhere in Stamford.
The site, in the heart of the Medieval town, suggests an early, perhaps pre-Norman, date for the foundation of the church but it is not until the middle of the twelfth century that it appears amongst property owned by Crowland Abbey. It is possible St Michael's was founded by Crowland.[2] The Medieval church comprised a nave with north and south aisles and a chancel with north and south chapels and was a frequent meeting place of ecclesiastical courts and corporation meetings.[3] It was extensively altered in the fifteenth century and again in the seventeenth at which time its western tower was made of wood, until 1761 when replaced in stone.[2] The church survived until 1832 when it collapsed after the Rector, the Rev. Charles Swan, removed a number of internal pillars from the nave apparently for aesthetic reasons.[4][5]
The current building, designed by John Brown of Norwich, was built in Ketton stone over 1835-6 largely on all fours with the earlier church, in Early English style. It was based on the style of the Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral and greatly applauded by the Stamford Mercury at the time.[4] It had a square west tower, iron railings around the perimeter of the site, substantial interior galleries “and elaborate pewing”.[6] The contractors were Woolston and Collins. The building's original estimated cost, in 1834, was £2,800, while the final, total cost by the time of opening, in 1836, was £4,000.[7] Of the Medieval building, “no more than two re-used possibly thirteenth century stiff-leaf capitals [survive] in an undercroft beneath the west tower”.[8]
John Clare Billing (1866–1955) wrote: “The church ... has received harsh criticism from architect and antiquary. The interior, they assert, is unecclesiastical in character and of concert-hall design." Billing noted that the churchyard was smaller until cottages between the King’s Head Inn and High Street were pulled down. He remembered, as a boy, seeing sheep grazing among the gravestones.[9]
