St Mary Magdalene, Flaunden

It must have been about the time of the move to Spring Gardens in 1838 that Sir George Gilbert Scott designed his first church. This was very much his own job as this was a church for his uncle Samuel King, to serve the people of Flaunden, Buckinghamshire, sited in the centre of the village. The old church on the outskirts of Latimer had been allowed to fall into ruin. In later years, when writing his Recollections, Scott is so deprecating of this his first tentative effort that he hardly considers it a proper church at all, and dismisses it as a ‘poor barn’. It is a single-cell church with a south porch, a north-east vestry, a bell turret at the west end and lancet windows. The decorative flint-work to the walls is reminiscent of nearby Amersham Workhouse except that this time the windows are lancets derived from the Early English style in the Church Commissioners traditions, rather than the Tudor of Amersham. Scott himself benefitted from a grant from the Church Building Society in 1837 towards the building of Flaunden Church.

Forwood, B., and Armitage, M., Latimer, A History (1981), p. 15.
Scott’s Recollections, I 296.
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