St Peter And St Paul

Three 1862 two-light windows to the S side (the SE one is dated), the fourth, westernmost window is weathered but medieval with two cusped lights below an octafoil.

S porch with a holy water stoup, porch partly rebuilt above the richly moulded, probably C14, Four-centred arched doorway with engaged shafts

Carved medieval heads to SW, SE and NE corners of nave.

Unusual carved stone anthropomorphic and zoomorphic corbels on the N & S walls marking the location of the medieval roof.

The E wall has an early-C19 carved wooden reredos of cusped blind arches with a brattished cornice.

1852 E window, glazed as a memorial to a Dr Pinching, is the only stained glass window in the church.

The arches and columns are heavily painted but the rib vaults, with little bosses, appear to be medieval.

1860s dado of encaustic tiles to the nave walls.

Pulpit, font and nave pews all also mid-C19.

Timber drum pulpit with cusped decoration.

Caen stone octagonal font decorated with blind panels supported on a clustered shaft.

Various wall monuments and inscription boards.

S porch, which has a late-medieval roof, has been converted to a Dunkirk memorial chapel.

Peel of eight bells, five of which date to 1656 with the remainder of C19 or C20 date.

ANCILLARY FEATURES: 1950 wooden lych gate war memorial with pitched tile roof to west.

HISTORY: A church at Milton is first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.

There is no surviving fabric that can be definitively identified as C11.

The church as it now stands is a mixture of Perpendicular architecture of the late-C14

early-C15 and a late-C18 restoration, with subsequent C19 and C20 works.

The tower is late-C14 or early-C15, the S porch is C14 and the nave is also medieval other than its upper courses which are late-C18, added to support the re-roofing of 1790-2.

The church was restored in 1852, to which date the nave pews, communion rails, east window (the only stained glass window in the church), pulpit and font can be attributed.

The adjoining parish rooms are an addition of 1992 incorporating two date stones of 1860 and 1862 (from a former school and headmaster's house) as well as a carved gravestone cross.

Newman, J & Pevsner, N, 1980, West Kent and the Weald, Buildings of England Series, 2nd edition, pp301-2 REASON FOR DESIGNATION DECISION: SS Peter & Paul, Milton-next-Gravesend is designated at Grade II* for the following principal reasons: * The extent of surviving medieval fabric from the C14

early-C15

* Architectural details of interest including: carved stone heads to the exterior, and a medieval rib-vaulted sedilia and a piscina with bosses and fine carved stone corbels internally.