By 1863, when the Foreign Office was at last rising from the ground, Sir George Gilbert Scott designed a new church in Taunton. This was St. John the Evangelist in Park Street, opposite Moffatt's Shire Hall, which was carried out in a particularly rugged version of Early English. It is built of pink coloured rubble with ashlar dressings, with plate tracery and lancets at the east and west ends with circular windows over. The spire over the tower, which stands on the south side of the chancel, is a sophisticated design with bands of different coloured stone and statues under pyramidical canopies in each corner. The interior is particularly sumptuous with marble shafts to the windows and a fine set of foliated capitals in the nave arcade.

Pevsner, N., South and West Somerset, Buildings of England (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1958), pp. 313, 315.