All Saints at Vange is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the Basildon area. The small church is of Norman origin and is constructed largely from ragstone and flint. Its simple nave and chancel preserve the scale and character of a rural medieval parish church.
A surviving Norman window and a twelfth-century font are among its earliest features. The font has a square bowl carried on five columns and includes chevron decoration. Fifteenth-century work includes windows, the south doorway, a rood-loft staircase and elements of the roof. At the west end is a weatherboarded timber bell turret with a shingled pyramidal roof.
The church continued serving Vange for centuries. Local heritage research records its last service as taking place in 1994. Its survival gives modern Basildon a direct architectural link with the Norman and medieval history of Vange.
St Peter's in Church Lane is Grade II* listed. Nevendon appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, although a church was not recorded there at that date. Historic England considers it likely that an early timber church preceded the surviving stone building.
The oldest surviving fabric is the thirteenth-century chancel. The nave was rebuilt in the fourteenth century and the whole church was reroofed in the fifteenth. A timber bell turret was added in the seventeenth century. Joseph Peacock restored the church and added the south vestry in 1858–59; the north porch followed in 1928 to designs by Sir Charles Nicholson.
The east window dates from 1950 and was designed by Rosemary Rutherford to replace a window destroyed during the Second World War. The churchyard contains historic monuments including the table tomb of Thomas Blackmore, who died in 1679, and members of his family.
The surviving tower of St Michael's on Pitsea Mount is one of Basildon's most dramatic church landmarks. Documentary evidence for a church at Pitsea reaches back to the twelfth century, when the area was associated with St John's Abbey, Colchester. The surviving west tower was built in the early sixteenth century.
A visitation in 1685 described the church as being in poor condition and leaning. The nave and chancel were rebuilt in 1871 to designs by Sir Arthur Blomfield, but structural problems continued. Construction of the A13 in the 1970s also separated the hilltop church from much of the community it had traditionally served.
St Michael's closed in 1979 and became redundant in 1983. After deterioration and severe vandalism, most of the church was demolished around 2000. The early-sixteenth-century tower and altar survive, and the tower remains Grade II listed.