The square tower of All Saints Church, topped by an octagonal stone spire, is one of its most distinctive features. It was added a few years later as a standalone feature of the original building. The spire required major repairs between 2006 and 2009.
The tower was built in 1865, a decade after Church itself, and was designed by the same architect George Edmund Street. The 80ft tower, built of banded brick, stood separate to the Church to house a peal of six bells. Within three years a fire severely damaged its interior and bells, which had to be re-cast and hung. Two further bells were added in 1882. A two-dial chiming clock was added in 1887, with clock faces to its north and south side.
When the Church was extended westwards in 1907 to mark its 50th anniversary, the tower was incorporated into the fabric of the building, with the door to the bell tower housed within the new north porch. It meant, however, that the south clock face became obscured from most vantages.
For more than a century and half, All Saints has been the highest building in Maidenhead owing to the 70ft spire in Bath stone above the tower, bringing its highest point to 150ft.
The spire required substantial repairs, costing around £1 million, after a block of masonry became loose and fell to the ground in 2006. Steeplejacks were sent up to investigate and photograph its cause. This showed numerous cracked and broken blocks of stone, caused by a band of rusting and expanding iron work embedded in the masonry at the top of the tower.
Generous support towards the works was received from Berkshire Churches Trust, National Churches Trust, Louis Baylis Trust, the Prince Philip Trust, the Council for the Care of Churches and some private benefactors. Critically, English Heritage awarded a development grant to All Saints’ Parochial Church Council to carry out detailed investigations.
Photogrammetry was used to use photographic images to create two and three-dimensional models of the tower and spire and thus itemise areas of brick and stonework that needed repair or replacement.
In March 2008, the English Heritage awarded a repair grant of £750,000, the largest grant ever awarded to an English parish church, and recognition indeed of the architectural importance of All Saints.
A contract to carry out the works was awarded to St Blaise, a construction company based in Guildford, that involved intricate stone carving, re-guilding the clock and weather vane and recreating a black pigment for replaced bricks to run in a parallel pattern around the tower.
Unforeseen challenges arose. Rusting iron bands running through the thickness of the masonry were found in five levels of the spire, which had to be removed and replaced with mortar. The weather vane at the pinnacle of the spire, which was to be renovated, also proved extremely difficult to remove. The vane rod inside a spire is usually held in place by a skeleton of small rods and is relatively easy to remove. However, the tower’s architect G E Street had experimented with Portland cement and filled the cavity with it to a depth of eleven levels of masonry. Three levels had to be removed before the vane could be drilled out.
The works finished in time for the bells of All Saints ring out again on Easter Day 2009.
The community at All Saints remains deeply grateful to the craftsmen and professionals whose work restored the spire in such a handsome manner, in particular to Roderick MacLennan, long-standing architect to the Church, and to those who generously funded this project.