Among Suffolk's smaller towns, Sudbury is the biggest. Until the 19th century, it was the county's third largest town, but industrial development elsewhere has left it behind. It still seems bigger than the official population suggests, since it embraces Great Cornard, Long Melford and Chilton within its built-up area, and you can visit six fine medieval churches here without travelling through fields.
Three of these churches are in Sudbury itself, and Sudbury is the only town in Suffolk outside Ipswich and Bury where the town centre was divided up into separate parishes, a mark of the medieval prosperity of this place. All of them are substantial, all of them are interesting. All of them are over-restored, and as the mother church of Sudbury, St Gregory has suffered more than most.
All Saints lies to the south of the town, and St Peter is on the market place. Until the Reformation, it was a chapel of ease to St Gregory, before being given its own parish, until redundancy came calling in the 1970s. All Saints and St Peter both have wholly urban settings, hemmed in by shops and housing. But St Gregory's aspect has been revealed by the construction of the ring road, which necessitated demolition of many houses in Gregory Street and Croft Street. With the Croft, a large grassed area leading down to the River Stour, and Leonard Stoke's jewel-like 1890 Church of Our Lady and St John beside it, St Gregory has a lovely setting.
It looks grand from a distance. Close up, it is a large and rather battered old lady. The lower parts of some windows are bricked up, probably an attempt to conserve heat when the church was a preaching house, so that people could endure the long sermons without freezing. The same thing can be seen at Blythburgh. The tower has a stair turret rising above the battlements, in the approved Stour Valley manner. A bequest of 1446 left the money for its construction.
The best approach is from the south, along the line of Gregory Street. Once past the rather alarming war memorial, we enter the graveyard through an avenue leading to the great south porch, contemporary with its clerestory above. The shape is similar to nearby Glemsford, except that here the porch and south chapel are combined, built together. The chapel is flush with the southern entrance to the porch, unlike the same at Stonham Parva, where intruding buttresses reveal that they were built separately.
The chapel formerly contained the shrine of Our Lady of Sudbury; this has been restored recently, four centuries after its destruction, by the adjacent Catholic church. There seems to be a good relationship between these two churches, incidentally; on several occasions recently, St Gregory has been used by the Catholic congregation, who no longer fit into their own church.
This is perhaps the grandest entrance to any Suffolk church, and you step into an interior which is rather pleasingly shabby; one is so used to Stour Valley Perpendicular being trim and shipshape, but here the patina of age survives, as well as a sense of continuity of use. Directly ahead of you is the magnificent font cover, much recoloured, and with its statues replaced. If those at Ufford and Southwold did not exist, it would seem grander. The 19th century restoration here was under the great William Butterfield, his best work in the county. There is a fine sequence of late 19th and early 20th century Saints in the nave windows, which are imposing without being overwhelming.