St Matthews was built at the cost of £400 9s 5d, (about £80,000 in today's money, a bargain then or now) the new church was constructed in red brick, and consecrated on the morning of the 13th September, 1836. It was a little towerless chapel, much in the contemporary style, with few of the trimmings that the growing sacramentalism of the next few decades would demand. Broadly speaking, it is the part of the present church to the north of the tower, although I think that the lovely white frontage, porch and buttressing must be later, for reasons that I will explain in a moment.
The architect was G R French, and an intriguing passage in White's 1844 Directory of Suffolk notes that it was built near the site of an old Quaker burial ground. Since such things were usually beside meeting houses, perhaps there was already a Friends' presence on the Heath before the Anglicans came along. The new church had the status of a chapel of ease to the mother church at Stoke by Nayland, but was provided with its own minister, the fiery evangelical Harold Curry, who, White tells us, had his own adjoining house - this must be the one to the rear of the site, now a private house. The minister was also provided with two acres of land, and a 3% return on £1,100 in stock.
By the time of the 1851 census of religious worship, the little chapel was maintaining morning and evening services, with an average attendance of 120 for the first and more than 200 for the second. It must have been a tight fit. So much so that, in 1880, Mortlock tells us that the architects Satchell and Edwards were called in to extend the building. They built the splendid bell tower with a wide south aisle behind it, and extended the original church eastwards with the addition of a chancel. These are strongly in the Tudor style, even with the addition of wide Perpendicular windows, and so I think they must also have been responsible for the frontage now in place on the original church, with its porch, all of which is fully Tudor in style. For example, the lancet window above the entrance matches a double one in the south wall of the new chancel. The use of unnecessary buttressing would have been fully in keeping with the style of the 1880s. So, we may assume that the architects completely transformed this place.
St Matthew's is part of the Benefice of Stoke-by-Nayland with Leavenheath and Polstead, and Nayland with Wissington; part of the Hadleigh Deanery.
This warm friendly well cared for small Victorian church lying in a tree lined hollow, signed off the A134 at the northern end of the village. It contains a unique set of First World War white grave crosses and associated photographs. .
The church is often open and worth a visit to see this unsual building and the Grave crosses and photographs.
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