In the mid-1850s the Reverend Edward Elton closed the village graveyard, which was overcrowded, and gave land from his glebe for a much larger one. That made sense. Pulling down the church erected just sixty years earlier in 1795 through the bequest of Mr Sims – a native of the village who made a fortune in Gibraltar – was another matter. The bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, condemned Mr Sims’s church because, with its plain rectangular form, its round-headed windows, and its gallery, there was little to distinguish it from a nonconformist chapel or meeting house. He ordered Elton to demolish it and build a church to be designed by the recently appointed diocesan architect and champion of early Gothic architecture, George Edmund Street, who had just finished the college at Cuddesdon. Not surprisingly, the destruction of Mr Sims’s church was opposed by the churchwardens, and the people of Wheatley contributed nothing to the cost of the new one. By writing (mainly) to past and present members of Oxford University, Elton raised nearly £2,500 in one year and ultimately, by the time the spire was finished in 1868, £3,500. Wheatley got the ‘correct’ church the bishop wanted, one which dominated the village, and set a distance between the congregation in the nave, the choir in the chancel, and the priest in the sanctuary. When Wilberforce consecrated the new church on 10 June 1857 he contrasted the old one, where a man had “worldly thoughts”, with the new one, where he could worship God “as pure as in Heaven”. A respectful congregation continued to worship in the new building, but popular disapproval at the way Wilberforce had behaved led to a ‘distancing’ which allowed a real Congregational Chapel to flourish in the village.
Fast forward a hundred and twenty-five years and the local stone is beginning to crumble. The church steeple, which is the most significant landmark in the village, must be repaired, and in 1994 an appeal raises £135,000. Wheatley has shown its appreciation of Street’s architecture, and the twentieth century has paid its debt to the nineteenth. Next, as in other active parishes and among other denominations, clergy and congregation need a committee room, a kitchen and toilets. The time has come to add on to Street’s church. Diocese and local planning authority are supportive, but this is a listed building, and there is, in effect, a power of veto resting with the Victorian Society. The church was not among Street’s major works, but extension is ruled out, and present and future needs will have to be accommodated internally. A sensitive plan involving a glass screen, which Street himself might have approved, is vetoed, and eventually a ‘compromise’ is imposed - the third best solution. In Wheatley, the nineteenth century Gothic revival arrived as an act of power tainted by party feeling, and the village was helpless in the face of a bishop. Now, the view from the parish is that vicar and congregation are being compelled by an irresponsible ‘other’ to labour on with a configuration and other features (like heavy and uncomfortable ‘thirteenth century’ wooden benches &c.) which have lost their spiritual meaning. The history of St. Mary’s church in Wheatley does not say much for remote decision making.