Take a seat on one of the rather fine mid-Victorian oak pews, and admire the wildflowers carved into the arm rests at each end, every one different.

The nave looks medieval, and it is – mostly. But it never quite looked like this in medieval times, and it certainly didn’t look like this 200 years ago. So let’s do a little time travelling.

The medieval nave is the same shape but it isn’t the same colour, for a start. The stone walls are plastered and painted with a procession of saints and stories. The windows are entirely filled with a riot of stained glass, the chancel is invisible behind the colourful rood screen, and you must kneel on the stone floor strewn with straw, or sit on a simple wooden bench if you’re lucky – or rich. The air is thick with candle-smoke and incense, and the vicar is singing a mass in Latin that only he can understand.

Now come forward a few hundred years to the mid-18th century – and what a change! The wall paintings have disappeared under a thick coat of whitewash, the ceiling is flat and plastered, and there’s a huge iron chandelier hanging from the centre of it, festooned with candles. The old rood screen has gone for firewood, the few remnants of stained glass will soon be knocked out, and all those medieval monuments have been unceremoniously shoved into corners.

Both aisles, and the west end of the nave, are fitted out with wide wooden galleries to squeeze in more seats, and all the windows have been enlarged to get as much daylight as possible into the gloomy spaces underneath.

You are sitting in a box pew with high wood panelled walls all round you, and you can only just glimpse the vicar preaching his hour-long sermon from the top of a 3-decker pulpit, a high wooden tower in the middle of the nave. All around you, a sea of box pews fills the rest of the church, each with its own little door and alleyway.

Let’s leap forward a hundred years, to 1858. Sir George Gilbert Scott, one of the most famous Victorian architects, has been commissioned to return St John’s to its medieval purity. Away go the galleries. Off comes the plaster ceiling to reveal the medieval roof hidden above it. Off, also, comes the whitewash, and the remaining medieval paintings underneath, unfortunately. Out go the box pews. The stone walls are scraped clean, the floor retiled with sanitary quarry tiles, low oak pews open out the seating area, and it all looks a little bare, to be honest – at least until the new stained glass starts arriving.

And that’s the church we have now. So, which version is the real one? In truth, they all are. Each age has adapted this venerable building to suit its own needs, and today’s church was never exactly like this at any previous time in its history. The church of St John the Baptist has lived through nearly a millennium of change, and we hope you have enjoyed seeing how it has become the building you are now standing in.