Whitby, St Mary

Treasures from the Parish Chest: exploring North Yorkshire’s church history from archives to architecture

A famous Whitby landmark, this Romanesque church hides a spectacular Georgian interior

One of North Yorkshire’s most well-loved parish churches, St Mary’s is visited by thousands of people each year who make the walk up the famous 199 steps to see the ruins of Whitby Abbey. The present church stands close to the site of the Anglo-Saxon monastery which hosted the Synod of Whitby in 667AD, a landmark in the history of the Church in England. The oldest parts of the current church date from the 12^th century after the church was refounded in 1110.

*‘The Way to Church’, 199 steps, Whitby [EF451/038A]*

Whitby’s steps were first recorded in 1340, though they are likely much older. Before the graveyard closed to new burials in the mid-19^th century, it was traditional for the deceased to be carried up the steps to the clifftop churchyard instead of using the road.

The Georgian interior gives an impression of what many parish churches looked like during the 18^th century

The 18^th century saw the radical altering of the medieval building. The domestic-looking Georgian windows were inserted and the north transept was extended out to the west in 1818. Internally the church was decked out with an astonishing medley of pews and galleries, constructed by the town’s shipwrights during the early-17^th to late-18^th centuries.

The galleries like the Cholmley Pew, which extends across the chancel arch, were accessed via an external staircase. This is a rare feature for an English church, though the use of staircases like this was a common practice in Scotland when converting medieval churches for Presbyterian worship.

Undated photograph of the external staircase at St Mary’s [EF451/038C]

With the growth of the Ecclesiological Movement in the 1840s, which advocated for a return to a Medieval style of church architecture in England, St Mary’s interior was no longer to everyone’s taste. Its own rector Reverend William Keane described the church as ‘now perhaps the most depraved sacred building in the kingdom’ in the 1860s. Despite this, St Mary’s interior remained, possibly because local patronage in the later-19^th century focused on the building of new, fashionable churches on the West Cliff, like St Hilda’s completed in 1889.