Church Crawling Round Guildford Centre

Within a walk of less than a couple of miles around the centre of Guildford, you can visit as wide a variety of churches as you can find anywhere. My stroll a few weeks ago began at St Nicolas, an old church which began acquiring a Catholic tradition in the mid-19th century. That combative High Churchman JM Neale once applied for the living, but the Bishop of Winchester decided Mr Neale was too dangerous a man to have in his diocese; John Monsell, an Anglican Catholic hymn-writer on a more modest scale than Neale, did end up incumbent of St Nic's, and oversaw its rebuilding, dying while actually inspecting the works (accounts differ as to how). Now St Nic's presents a fairly consistent image of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, though with some additions and alterations over the years. Unusually, though, it's the west end which is the more sumptuous, mosaic and painting providing a backdrop to a towering Gothic font-cover. 

I'm not sure yet of the date when the nave altar was installed. The point of interest is that it has triangular legs, a Trinitarian theme which is picked up in the motifs of the floor. 

Not far away, St Mary's is now shared with the Methodists, and its churchmanship is a bit indeterminate. It trades more on its antiquity, and there are some vistas which - despite the sense of clutter around the building - provide a sense of monolithic drama.

The grandest church in the town centre is Holy Trinity, an old church rebuilt in the 18th century as a typical Georgian preaching-box and then remodelled in the 1890s. It's gathered a variety of artworks over the course of the last few decades, but its great surprise is the openwork iron screen which spans the whole east end and which was installed in 1909 - a reja, they'd call it in Spain. 

The wonderful Byzantine east end dates to the 1890s, and while the church now has a moderate Catholic tradition (there are icons about and the Sacrament is reserved), the east end hints at more. The predella behind the high altar, installed in 1948, has a space for a tabernacle - and remember, this is not some off-the-wall back-street Anglo-Catholic church but nothing less than (at that time) the pro-cathedral of the Bishop of Guildford. It shows what was acceptable in the Church of England by that stage.

To the north of the town centre we find a different style: the churches here were daughter establishments of St John's Stoke Park, whose tradition was more evangelical. I was lucky to get into Christ Church (they were setting up for a concert) although I have to say there wasn't a lot to see. 

Meanwhile, St Saviour's not far away is one of the great hothouses of the Guildford Diocese. The church does have a monumental sort of grandeur and though I was surprised it hasn't been reorientated to face one of the long walls, in fact that would work very awkwardly here. It has the carved wooden reredos we have come to expect to find in High Victorian evangelical churches, although curiously there's a marble block inserted between the reredos and the mensa.

But at St Saviour's the old church is an adjunct to the rest of the plant. What you see when you come in is the reception desk - the corporate HQ model of church! You do get Love, though, as you can see through the office glass.