A CHURCH in Warwickshire in need of £250,000 for emergency repairs has been included on the Victorian Society’s list of top ten endangered buildings in 2023.

The Grade II listed St Andrew’s, Temple Grafton, is fund-raising to meet the cost of repairing what the Society describes as “serious structural issues”. The building, with loose oak shingles on the roof and spire, has been deemed unsafe for services. Scaffolding was erected in March, when the congregation funded initial emergency repairs, but more extensive works were needed to secure its future, the Society said.

The President of the Victorian Society, Griff Rhys Jones, said of the building: “It’s just magnificent. The heart of many country villages is the church, and this is a gem. We cannot let it go. It would be a tragedy if Temple Grafton were to lose a second church.”

The Gothic church, on the edge of a hill with views across a valley to Bredon Hill and the Cotswolds, was built in 1875 by the architect Frederick Preedy. It replaced an Anglo-Saxon church thought by historians to be where the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway took place. The current building was funded by a Victorian thread manufacturer, William Carlisle, who also built a new school, cottages, a vicarage, and his own house in the area.

Other buildings listed by the Society this year include Liverpool Street Station and the former Great Eastern Hotel; Rockwell Green Water Tower, Somerset; Trowse Sewage Pumping Station, Norwich; and the Coach and Horses Hotel, Wallsend.