Church of St Nicholas

St Nicholas Church stands in the centre of Nuneaton, a market town in Warwickshire. The building is mainly of sandstone with tiled roofs and a tall west tower. It dates from about 1340 but may occupy the site of an earlier Saxon church. The tower has three stages and is braced by diagonal buttresses. Inside, an aisled nave leads to a three-bay chancel with side chapels and a north vestry. The church is worth visiting for its medieval roof and Victorian restoration. The roof shows large beams, carved bosses and the emblem of the Five Wounds of Christ. In the 1850s Ewan Christian extended the chancel and fitted new pews. An organ was installed in 1813. The church appears as Milby Church in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. A visitor finds an aisled nave with a high medieval roof and Victorian furnishings. The Leeke Chapel holds a stained glass window of 1923, the only survivor of the 1941 bombing. Other windows are plain and the tower contains a ring of eight bells, the oldest from 1703. Several memorials line the walls, including one to Marmaduke Constable who died in 1560.