St Laurence's is Church Stretton's medieval parish church, sitting at the centre of the old settlement. The nave dates to the 12th century, making it by some centuries the oldest building in town. The church was substantially enlarged in Victorian times, when Church Stretton was reinventing itself as a spa resort, but the Norman bones survive throughout.
The highlight is the sheela na gig carved above the north doorway — a small, explicit fertility figure of a type associated with pre-Christian practice, occasionally found incorporated into early Norman church fabric. The Church Stretton example is well-preserved and somewhat startling in its frankness. Academics debate whether such figures were absorbed from existing folk tradition or served as moral warnings; either way, finding one above a church door is a reminder that medieval Christianity made room for things that would later seem incompatible. story: "Sheela na gigs — carved figures explicitly displaying female genitalia — were incorporated into dozens of Norman churches in Ireland and Britain. Nobody fully agrees on their meaning. One theory holds that they warded off evil; another that they were retained from an older symbolic tradition the Church found it easier to absorb than to destroy."