St Austell is a town near the S coast of central Cornwall, 9 miles S of Bodmin and 30 miles W of the Devon border. It was no more than a village centred around the church until the 18thc., when it begain to grow through the tin mining and then the china clay industries. The population in 2021 was 20,900. The church is in the centre of the town and is dominated by a tall late-15thc. W tower of Pentewan (Elvan) stone dateable to the episcopy of Peter Courtenay. It consists of a nave of five bays with N and S aisles, a chancel of two bays and a two-storeyed S porch. All of this is 14th-15thc work, but the earliest fabric is in the S aisle chapel which is 13thc. The latest work is the result of an enlargement in 1498-99. The church and the font were restored in 1891-92 under the direction of G. H. Fellowes Prynne (Royal Cornwall Gazette, Western Morning News). The remains of the previous building can still be seen and there are two Romanesque pieces: the font and part of a pillar piscina.

The settlement of St Austell does not appear in the Domesday Survey. The church was granted to Tywardreath Priory in 1155x1160. It was appropriated with a vicarage established by 1284. Following Lysons, the manor belonged to Tywardreath too, until the Dissolution when it was annexed to the Duchy of Cornwall. The church dedication was to St Austolus in 1169, and it was rededicated to the Holy Trinity, probably at the time of its enlargement in the late-15thc.

The font is an early example of the suspended bowl type, misleadingly called the Bodmin type as it may be dated to the mid-12thc.: at least a generation before the production of the core Bodmin group of fonts. It is very similar to the font at Luxulyan, and closely related to those at Tregony and Kea. Neither Sedding nor Beacham offer a date, but it is so close to Luxulyan that it must be roughly contemporary, i.e. c.1150-60. Unlike the Bodmin core group of fonts the corner heads are not winged, and the Tree of Life appears on only one face, surrounded on the other three by dragons, cats and birds. Although the four corner heads are formally very similar, each has its own character.