Building record HIG 006 - Church of St Stephen, Higham

Higham church lies within diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, archdeaconry of Sudbury, deanery of Mildenhall. Status : vicarage (S1).
The church was built in 1861 by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the Early English geometric style. Scott took an East Anglian model for the round W tower and added to it : a nave, N aisle, S porch, lower buttressed chancel, and a small vestry at the NE corner. The church was built in traditional flint with Ancaster stone dressings. This is the only complete example of a Scott church in Suffolk; it is a classic small country church in the Scott style. Within the chancel is a 2-seat sedilia and the floor is covered with brightly coloured encaustic tiles which were popular with the "Ecclesiologists". The 3-light E window has Purbeck marble shafts as have the smaller chancel windows. The pulpit is set on marble shafts and ornamented with relief busts of St Peter and St Paul and stiff-leaf foliage. It is by Farmer. The W tower is round. The upper stage is banded with blind arcading and has a stumpy shingle-clad spire capping it. At the base of the tower Scott placed the baptistry and gave it a stone rib-vaulted roof (added after the main work was completed). All the glass in the church is after 1873 and by Clayton and Bell (S2).

(See HIG 023 for Churchyard)