St Giles' Church is a church in

Blaston Blaston is a village and civil parish in the Harborough district of Leicestershire. It is a small parish with a population of 54 according to the 2001 census. As the population had remained less than 100 details from the 2011 census are inclu ...

Leicestershire Leicestershire ( ; postal abbreviation Leics.) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East Midlands, England. The county borders Nottinghamshire to the north, Lincolnshire to the north-east, Rutland to the east, Northamptonshire t ...

. It is a

Grade II In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

listed building.

History

The current church was built in 1878, to the design of

George Edmund Street George Edmund Street (20 June 1824 – 18 December 1881), also known as G. E. Street, was an English architect, born at Woodford in Essex. Stylistically, Street was a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Though mainly an eccle ...

, replacing an earlier church. It consists of a

nave The nave () is the central part of a church, stretching from the (normally western) main entrance or rear wall, to the transepts, or in a church without transepts, to the chancel. When a church contains side aisles, as in a basilica-type ...

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may terminate in an apse. Ove ...

bell-cote A bellcote, bell-cote or bell-cot is a small framework and shelter for one or more bells. Bellcotes are most common in church architecture but are also seen on institutions such as schools. The bellcote may be carried on brackets projecting from ...

containing 1 bell and a south porch. There are 2

fonts In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mode ...

, one of them dates to the time of the building of the church and the other one is earlier. The nave has a painting of St Jerome on the north wall. It was painted by Decio Vilares in 1877. The

Brazilian flag The national flag of Brazil ( pt, bandeira do Brasil), is a blue disc depicting a starry sky (which includes the Southern Cross) spanned by a curved band inscribed with the national motto "''Ordem e Progresso''" ("Order and Progress"), within a ...

was also designed by a

Décio Villares Décio Rodrigues Villares (1 December 1851, in Rio de Janeiro – 21 June 1931, in Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, caricaturist, and graphic designer. He is best known for helping to design the blue disc on the Brazilian Flag an ...

but, despite different spellings, it is unknown whether this is the same person. The nave's screens have 2 segments of stained glass.

References

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