Woking Two

A second trip to look at the churches of Woking brought me, first, to St Peter’s Old Woking. The mother-church of the town itself, St Peter’s now joins in the general Evangelical flavour of Woking Anglicanism despite its picturesque elements dating back to earlier stages in its life. It seems to be another church battered about by a Victorian restoration which brought in decorated floor tiles and windows depicting saints but got no further than that liturgically. The chancel was refurbished quite late in a sort of pseudo-Jacobean style, in memory of an incumbent who died in 1911. I need to ask about some odd metal diamonds laid into the dais where I presume they wheel in an altar when required. Surely they don’t use the old high altar at the east end? - and were it me I would have to align it properly against the middle of the wall ...

St John’s was the first church built to serve Victorian Woking: it was split off from St Peter’s, and then the other churches were split off from it. It earns probably one of the rudest rebukes I’ve read in Pevsner’s volumes: he points out that George Gilbert Scott didn’t include it in his list of ‘ignoble’ churches built early in his career, but, Pevsner snorts, ‘he should have’, and that’s his only remark on it. St John’s has had a resolutely Evangelical tradition from its start, and so it has a spiky but all-wood reredos behind the altar, and a modern baptismal pool beneath the chancel – but there’s still some fancy mosaic-work around the altar, and the early 1900s permitted a window of SS Margaret, Faith and Perpetua in memory of a parishioner. In the rogues’ gallery of incumbents along the hallway, Revd Hamilton, the great late-Victorian vicar of Woking, wears a white bowtie as a signal that he’s having nothing to do with all this Oxford Movement nonsense.

My chum the vicar of St Andrew’s Goldsworth Park said it wouldn’t delay me very long, and it didn’t. This building dates to the 1980s and it’s worth comparing it with St Barnabas, Iford, a 1960s church of which I am very fond and which shares a similar plan, church upstairs and ancillary rooms below: at Iford, however, a general Catholic ethos means the fittings are massively and immovably built of concrete whereas at Goldsworth Park they don’t even have a fixed font – one gets brought in from a cupboard when needed. The baptismal pool is under the carpet of the café downstairs! Kate the vicar (no point not using her real name) recounted how St John’s is setting up a Woking network of ‘Gospel Churches’ which ‘Open Evangelical’ St Andrew’s definitely hasn’t been asked to join.

With some relief I managed to reach St Mary’s, Horsell, the villagey church on the north side of the town which I failed to get into a couple of weeks ago. Here they definitely had a Catholic tradition which seems to date from around the time of the major reconstruction of the church in 1890. The old church had had a rood screen which was removed in 1840, but a new one appears to have been put in either in 1890 when the chancel was rebuilt and choir stalls, piscina and sedilia put in and the sanctuary floor decorated with some rather nice marble and mosaic, or in 1909 when a side chapel was created. That has a screen incorporating bits of an earlier one; at some stage an aumbry for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament appeared. Then sometime after 1970 the chancel screen was removed leaving just the rood beam topped by a cross, and a dais and nave altar introduced. In all of this, Horsell’s history mirrors Swanvale Halt’s almost exactly. But Horsell church’s most astonishing feature is the sumptuous baptistery created in 1921 as a memorial to the son of a former curate, killed in World War One. When I was at Lamford I went to a curates’ training day at Horsell, and the then vicar told us how he was desperate to move the font out of this curious and impracticably tiny space, and that has now happened: the baptistery has become a crèche area and the font now stands, much more sensibly, in the main body of the church.