As regards the interior of the Georgian St. Mary’s Sculcoates (s.p.b.) Greenwood,1835, (s.p.b.) describes the interior of the church as ‘neat’, this a common impression on the interior of Georgian churches. He writes of its two four-bay arcades dividing nave from aisles, the pulpit and desks ‘grouped in the centre of the nave’ (typical of an ‘auditory’ church) and of a ‘magnificent font of shell marble’ located at the west end of the nave under a ‘semi-circular gallery’. This gallery (raised, tiered pews at the west end of the nave, supported on columns and created to increase the seating capacity) had been erected in 1827 (Greenwood p. 78) which is late for such additions, so-much-so that the one at the west end of Beverley Minster, for example, was being taken down in the same decade, heralding the resolve of the Gothic Revival adherents to do away with 18th century innovations.
Greenwood also described the churchyard, two interesting comments from this part of the text being that ‘a large vase on a large pedestal’ so described survives today (see the picture for the next blog), and secondly, that in one corner of the churchyard was then ‘within iron palisades is the figure of a female, resting one hand on an urn and with the other covering her face; beneath is an inscription to Sarah Isabella wife of John Alderson M.D. In the same vault are also deposited the remains of the late Dr. Alderson’. Dr. John Alderson is famous in the medical history of Hull and was made a freeman of the town in1813 ‘for his twenty years’ service to the sick and poor’ (Gillett, E. and MacMahon, K. A History of Hull (Hull University Press, 1989, 259).
The second St. Mary’s Sculcoates was demolished in 1916 and its replacement a few hundred yards west is an interesting example of construction during the Great War (see photo above taken from Sculcoates Lane).