Church Directory

Grantchester Church comprises a Chancel, a Nave with a South Aisle, a West Tower and a North Porch. It is of Norman or late Saxon origin. The Chancel was rebuilt c.1360. Its reticulated gothic stone tracery is particularly fine and the glazing provides a beautiful natural light.

1905 Baptist church. A complex composition with a corner spire in red brick with stone dressings & slate roofs, described by Pevsner (2014) as ‘assertively neo-Perpendicular’, it was designed by John Wills & Sons of Derby, a prolific firm of chapel architects, and partly funded by the Chivers family of Histon jam manufacturers. It incorporates a sundial salvaged from an earlier house on the site in the south transept.

The core of Holy Trinity is medieval but one would never know it by the extensive Victorian ‘restoration’. Architect R.R. Rowe thoroughly rebuilt the church from 1871-1877 in a very personal eclectic style. This includes a flat roofed tower with an unusual turret staircase topped by a ‘pepper pot’ cupola.

Although Rowe preserved 13^th century lancet windows, a double piscina and sedilia in the chancel, he thoroughly rebuilt the transepts. The crossing is entirely Rowe, with polished red granite columns and beautiful floral capitals. The 14^th century nave culminates with the Perpendicular font decorated with carved roses and angels bearing shields. Rowe even relocated the south porch further to the west.

A large, light church; mostly fourteenth-century with large clerestorey and aisle windows dating from the fifteenth-century. The nave roof has carved angels and Apostles. The aisle roofs have angels together with an unusual feature: the four Evangelists shown as human figures with the heads of their symbolic beasts. The ox of St Luke is particularly visible on the north aisle roof. Against the south aisle wall two very large late sixteenth-century monuments.

From the outside quite a plain, narrow church. But look inside, and you will
see traces of wall paintings rediscovered in recent years. If you look hard you can make out
the Seven Deadly Sins that our medieval forebears were supposed to avoid.

A largely Thirteenth-century church raised well above both High Street and river. In the churchyard is a memorial stone to a group of Anglo-Saxon skeletons exhumed and re-buried when the north porch was built. The great glory inside is the chancel, glowing with sensitively conserved Victorian murals, tiles and a carved alabaster altar table.