Emily Meynell Ingram and Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, Staffordshire: A Study in Patronage

Almost from the moment of its consecration, on 26 April 1876, the church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross in Staffordshire was spoken of as an exceptional building. There was more than local pride in a contemporary newspaper report of its unveiling, which declared it to be ‘one of the most beautiful churches in the kingdom … the dignity of the conception, the beauty of the proportion, and the elaborate care lavished on even the minutest detail, carry one back to those days which have left us such memorials as the Percy shrine or the Beauchamp chapel’. That perceptive reference to those medieval sources of inspiration suggests one of the reasons why the church made such an immediate impression. It was the first complete embodiment in a rural setting of a new ideal in the Gothic revival, which in the previous decade had turned its back on the exotic and eclectic style now called High Victorian and had returned to English architecture of the mid-fourteenth century as the point of departure for modern churches. At Hoar Cross, Bodley and Garner, the architectural partnership which had taken the lead in that movement, worked in close collaboration with an exceptional patron, Emily Meynell Ingram, to help realize a compelling new visual identity for the nineteenth-century Anglican parish church.