Alfred Burges was a civil engineer. He worked in partnership with James Walker, Chief Engineer for Trinity House, the body responsible for British lighthouses. In the 1850s Trinity House was funding the construction of a new Low Lighthouse at nearby Spurn Point, which is why Alfred Burges occasionally found himself passing through Kilnsea on professional visits. The Yorkshire Gazette of 22 April 1865 recorded what happened next: 'the great liberality of Mr A. Burgess C.E., of Blackheath, who having occasionally passed (Kilnsea) on his professional visits to Spurn Point and struck with the poverty of the place, having heard that an effort was being made for building a church, most kindly offered plans free of all expense, and gave £150 towards its completion'. The plans, Pevsner notes drily, were actually drawn up by Alfred Burges's two sons. One of them was William Burges.

William Burges was about to become one of the most extraordinary architects of the High Victorian period. Cardiff Castle, Castell Coch, churches dripping with gold and medieval revivalism, interiors so densely decorated they make the eyes ache. But here in remote Kilnsea, working with his father on a small replacement parish church for a fishing hamlet that kept losing its buildings to the sea, he produced something quiet, practical and modest. The total construction cost was £420. The church was so unobtrusively designed that J. Mordaunt Crook, in his definitive gazetteer of Burges's known buildings included in William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, didn't even include it. It took until December 2018 for the building to be listed Grade II - and the rediscovery came largely through Pevsner revisions and the patient work of David Neave.

The hamlet of Kilnsea has had a hard hundred and fifty years. Erosion never stopped. The Crown and Anchor public house still serves locals, but the congregation that filled the pews shrank to almost nothing, and on 20 June 1993 the last service was held at St Helen's. The diocese declared it redundant. It was sold for conversion to a private house. A tablet commemorating two villagers killed in the First World War was removed and is now at All Saints' in Easington. Two unknown merchant seamen lost during that same war lie in the small graveyard. They were brought in by the tide. No one ever identified them. They wait now in a quiet plot beside a church that almost no one knows was designed by William Burges, in a village that used to be larger, on a coast that keeps moving inland and forgetting what stood there before.