St Mary, Aylesbury
St Mary, Aylesbury
St Mary’s is a Grade I parish church on St Mary’s Square, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in the Diocese of Oxford. The square around it has the character of a small cathedral close.
- Location
- Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
- Country
- England
- County
- Buckinghamshire
- City / town
- Aylesbury
- Address
- St Marys Square, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, HP20 2JJ
- Postcode
- HP20 2JJ
- Built
- Mainly C13 on a Saxon site; C14–C15 additions; restored 1849–69
- Architect
- George Gilbert Scott (restoration)
- Denomination
- Church of England
- Dedication
- Mary
- Diocese
- Oxford
- Parish
- Aylesbury
- Grade
- I
- Style
- Early English cruciform; Decorated and Perpendicular additions
- Materials
- Squared rubble, partly re-faced with ashlar; stone dressings; lead roofs
- Grid reference
- SP 817 139
- Opening hours
- Monday to Friday 9.15am to 2.30pm. Saturday 11am to 1.30pm. Sunday 8am to 10am.
- Access
- Level access to the main areas. Accessible toilets nearby
Overview
Historic England describes a mainly thirteenth-century cruciform church, built partly on the site of a Saxon church and extensively restored between 1804 and 1809, with a Saxon crypt under the Lady Chapel and a Norman font. The Royal Commission recorded a probable twelfth-century church entirely rebuilt in the first half of the thirteenth century: chancel, central tower, transepts each with an east chapel, nave and aisles. The Lady Chapel was added south of the south transeptal chapel in the fourteenth century; a two-storey north vestry, a rebuilt south porch and a clerestory followed in the fifteenth.
By the mid nineteenth century the foundations had failed. Geoff Brandwood’s account in Records of Buckinghamshire describes a twenty-year restoration under George Gilbert Scott, begun late in 1849 and marked by a sermon of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce on 28 September 1869, at a cost of some £15,000. The listing notes a good sixteenth-century monument to Lady Lee in the north transept.