The parish church of St Mary the Virgin at Stone near Dartford, under construction in about 1260, is justly famous for its ambitious choir, the work of masons from the premier Gothic building in England, Henry III’s Westminster Abbey. The choir of Stone is a miniature Westminster: its generous bar-tracery windows and its lusciously carved wall arcades bring the metropolitan glamour of the abbey to a north Kent parish church on the Thames estuary (Fig. 1). Not surprisingly, this mysterious transfer has distracted attention from the virtues — indeed almost from the very existence — of the nave of the church. Only John Newman, in what is still the most incisive analysis of the whole building, gave proper weight to the nave’s elegant enrichment and noble proportions. There can be little doubt that the nave, which was built sequentially to the choir in the 1260s, belongs to the same Westminster milieu; but whereas the choir seems to depend solely on the abbey church, the nave reflects a much wider range of inspiration, from the hinterland of Westminster’s own sources, namely the architecture of southern England in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Most importantly, the nave stands in self-conscious contrast to the choir, a contrast which offers important clues to its unnoticed significance. Despite the choir’s élan, it is the nave which ensures Stone’s place of honour in the history of English Gothic architecture.