© PE Blanche 2001

I visited this Church on my way back from picking my daughter up from a grueling seven hour flight from Canada which fortunately, she has come to expect. Neither of my children manage to get from Gatwick to Canterbury without having to visit at least one church on the way! As we waited outside the South porch for the children from the local school to finished their rehearsals for some kind of Christmas production, I was glancing around the walls and what I was looking at just didn't seem right for a church with the layout of St. Martins. The stonework just looked very new by the standards of churches in this part of the world. When I was finally able to get into the Church while the Vicar and other people in attendance got ready to lock up the building again, a tablet (pictured left) on the corner of the South Transept greeted me. Subsequently, I have seen pictures of the Church taken at the time of the fire and the damage was extremely extensive.

The Chancel and East Window © PE Blanche 2001 The notice over this item reads: "COFFIN LID Dating from Saxon times Evidence of a Church on this site During that period" © PE Blanche 2001

Unfortunately, the recent fire seems to have been the most recent of a long line of problems and disasters at this Church in one way or another. It is believed that there was an early Saxon Church on this site. A coffin lid, said to be Saxon in origin, stands under the West tower (pictured below, left). It was discovered inside the wall of the Chancel during a Victorian reconstruction. The Chancel was the first part of the Church to be built in its present form in the early 13th Century, The Nave was added to the Chancel and finally the Tower was added late in the 14th Century. The North transept was also added during the 14th Century, just before the Tower and was paid for by the Stockets, the then owners of nearby Brasted Place. Early in the 19th Century the Church was said to have been in very poor repair and the Vicar at the time was about to take the matter in hand when he died suddenly and the repairs were then left to the mid 19th Century. At that point, an architect by the name of Alfred Waterhouse was hired to completely remodel the Church and most of the building was taken down to ground level, other than the 14th Century Tower, and rebuilt using much of the original stone. As a consequence, as we enter the 20th Century, very little of the earlier Church remained. Further problems were caused to the structure during the Second World War when a flying bomb fell and exploded in the area which is now the car park for the Church at the Eastern end of the building. This did a large amount of damage in the Cancel area, cracking the wall and also putting the organ inside the building out of commission for many years. In fact, it took at least ten years before the ground stabilized and repairs could be undertaken to the walls because of the the subsidence that had been caused by the blast. Finally, as already mentioned above, in 1989 there was a fire at the Church which caused a huge amount of damage to the interior and the roof. Fortunately, the parts that did survive were the 14th Century Tower and the Stockets Chapel. From the account I have read of the damage to the Church after W.W.II, including the subsequent fire, the impressive part is how the local people pulled together by arranging many fund raising events to eventually rebuild their Church which will hopefully, not suffer any more unfortunate events in the years to come. © PE Blanche 2001 The new Nave and Chancel, Brasted Church.