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Little St Mary's sits just off Trumpington Street, tucked between the Emmanuel United Reform Church and the college of Peterhouse, the first of Cambridge's medieval parish churches encountered by a traveller arriving from the south. It's a nice location, and the verdant churchyard is one of the loveliest places in Cambridge, especially in the spring and early summer.
You enter the church through the north-west porch. It looks like a stubby little tower, and perhaps therefore a remnant of some abortive early building project. In fact there are some remnants of old masonry here (the wall between the porch and the nave is 12 th century, the oldest stonework on the site), but both the tower and the adjacent vestry are Victorian.
The main body of the church itself is 14 th century. It is at once a very simple and a very grand building. There are no aisles, and there is no chancel arch, but it is nevertheless a big structure, with very grand Decorated windows, especially in the east end. Save for that east window, the glass is mostly clear, which makes it an especially nice space when the sun illuminates the trees running along the north edge of the church. Combined with the high kingpost roof, it gives the whole structure something of the air of a mendicant church from medieval Italy, one of those huge barns where the followers of St Dominic or St Francis preached to the massive congregations of the unsettled trecento.
The only substantial additions to this 14 th century structure are roughly in the middle of the church, where two 15 th century chantry chapels were added. The one on the north side has now been removed; all that remains is a broad tomb arch (now set up like a shallow Easter sepulchre) with a closed-off doorway next to it. On the opposite side the chantry has also been lost, but the space is now used as a passageway through to a modern lady chapel, with a nice barrel vault painted blue with gold stars. That addition - of a lady chapel, I mean - gives a clue to the liturgical orientation of Little St Mary's, which is Cambridge's Anglo-Catholic bastion par excellence. Not that one needs much of a clue, however. I have never been in there without being struck by the scent of incense, and even if one had a cold I think the gigantic silver candlesticks on the altar would give it away.
In the east end of the south wall, just beyond a big modern organ set into a loft, there is an interesting arrangement. Here, there is the outline of a large decorated window to mirror the easternmost one in the north wall. But this one contains glass only in the upper section, which opens into an interior room in the building which connects the church to the college of Peterhouse next door. Underneath that, the responds continue downwards into blind arcading, with a set of four arches (which have sadly lost their canopies) sitting over a piscina and a set of three sedilia below.
The connection with Peterhouse is not merely physical, incidentally. Several former fellows are commemorated by memorial plates here (especially in the west wall; there are several nice ones there) and the college's shield sits freshly painted on the nice font, which also has a charming 17 th century wooden cover suspended from the ceiling with a very long chain and counterweight. In fact, the original dedication of this church was to St Peter, and the college took its name from here; upon its foundation the church was given to the new academic community, for whom it served as a chapel until the present replacement was built in the early 17 th century.
St Mary is usually open.