Christ Church, Kilndown

Christ Church was commissioned by Viscount Beresford, who was a Field Marshal under Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars. at a cost of £2500. It was originally designed as a chapel-of-ease for the nearby St Mary's Church, Goudhurst, but an Act of Parliament established it as its own independent Church of England parish in 1843. This Act, which was associated with the various Church Building Acts passed in the first decades of the 19th century, was passed on 24 February 1843. It described the parish of Goudhurst as having 2,850 residents but only one parish church (St Mary's), with a capacity of 750, and the new chapel of ease (Christ Church) with 413 seats, 313 of…

Christ Church is built of sandstone quarried in Kilndown village. Inside, the church has a low, wide, "stringy" hammerbeam roof, considered by the Cambridge Camden Society as a particularly unsympathetic feature of the original "mean and bad" interior. The 1840 work partly concealed this behind a pierced parapet. which is separately listed at Grade II and is located immediately outside the south wall.