Christ Church was commissioned by Viscount Beresford, who was a Field Marshal under Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars.

The Act then created the "Chapelry District of Kilndown", consisting of the southwestern part of St Mary's parish.

The result was a plain Gothic "sandstone box"[9] of little architectural merit: architectural historian Roger Homan states that the work subsequently undertaken at the direction of Viscount Beresford's stepson Alexander Beresford Hope "rescued and transformed ... a commonplace country church".

[10] Over the course of five years from March 1840[9] he directed substantial alterations "in accordance with Ecclesiological principles", with particular emphasis on the interior, the east end and the chancel.

[13] William Whewell advised on the design of the windows which were made in Munich-style stained glass and ordered from the Kingdom of Bavaria.

[11][17] Inside, the church has a low, wide, "stringy" hammerbeam roof, considered by the Cambridge Camden Society as a particularly unsympathetic feature of the original "mean and bad" interior.

[11][12] The architects employed by Beresford Hope to renovate the church were among the most important of the early Victorian era and included two of the "darlings of the [Cambridge Camden] Society": Richard Cromwell Carpenter, who designed the chancel screen and choir stalls, and William Butterfield, who was responsible for the lectern, the pulpit (adjacent to the vestry, and modelled on one at Beaulieu Abbey) and a "distinctive" brass candelabra.

[14][11] Accordingly, the church "became an object of national interest" as a test-bed for the Cambridge Camden Society's theories and an exemplar of its ideas.