Like all ancient buildings, All Saints has required renovation from time to time. An inspection of 1637 reported "Church and chancel windows greatly in decay in the glasswork.....the N aisle to be repaired in the walls and tiles, and to be whitened....." A major restoration took place in 1864.

The picture above, dating from about 1830 and now in the collection of the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (reproduced here with their permission), shows All Saints as it was before the restoration took place. The work was carried out under the direction of G.E. Street, who was the Oxford Diocesan Architect. He was sensitive to the decorated period features of the church, and eliminated some of the later alterations to bring it more into line with his ideas of how it would have been in about 1330. A major change was to the nave roof which became a steeply-pitched tile roof as it is today. The interior was extensively remodelled with the plaster being stripped from the walls (not as it would have been in 1330!) and a new floor of contemporary tiles with wood under the nave seating. Sadly, some memorials in the chancel floor were lost in this process. Many of the furnishings were changed including the pulpit, font and pews, and quotations from the scriptures were affixed on boards over all the windows and archways. These have since been removed.

Heating was provided by a system of ducts under the tiles which conveyed smoke from some six fire-boxes also under the tiled portions of the floor. The installation can never have been very efficient, and was soon replaced by more conventional heating. However the ducts remain and have occasionally caused the floors to sink!

Restorations have continued in the twentieth century, and extensive repairs were carried out from 1978 onwards to almost the end of the century costing about £170,000. Much stonework was replaced and rising damp was eliminated. The tower was strengthened and the bells set in order.


Among the many projects to be tackled, the clock faces were re-gilded in 1997 and G.E. Street's roofs were repaired and re-tiled in 2003.

Despite this, repairs are still needed and the restoration work is on-going to include the inside of the nave roof and some of the stained glass windows.

There have also been more modern developments. In 2009 a new toilet block was constructed in the shell of a north porch outside the north door to the nave. The exterior was designed to match the architecture of the church as far as possible although the interior is, of course, modern. There were no marked graves in the area of the new porch, so the discovery of about 100 skeletons while digging the foundations and the drainage runs was not anticipated! All burials were carefully recorded by the archaeologists from Archaeological Services & Consultants who also discovered a number of artefacts while monitoring the excavations. The bones were given a Christian re-burial elsewhere in the churchyard on 15th September 2009. The artefacts included shards of Roman pottery (together with some mediaeval pieces) and iron slag, thought to have been left from iron production also in Roman times. These have been sent to the Buckinghamshire County Museum for safekeeping.

A sharpened flint tool was also found indicating the possibility of there having been a settlement in the area of Middleton much earlier than the roman period.

© Note: the 1830 picture of All Saints is the copyright of the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies and any form of reproduction, transmission, performance, display, rental, lending or storage in any retrieval system is prohibited without the consent of the copyright holders.

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