Amazement at The Bourne

I have built up something of a backlog of church interiors to share with you, but something brief for now. On Friday I managed to tick off a whole seven churches, all of which were open with the exception of Good Shepherd, Dockenfield, a lovely little Arts-and-Craftsy building of 1910 and possibly the most architecturally creative of the lot, but which I hadn't expected to be open anyway; in fact before seeing the name of the village on the road sign I'd forgotten it even existed. But the biggest surprise of the trip lay elsewhere. 

St Thomas on the Bourne on the edge of Farnham is somewhere I've been before, but have only been inside the meeting room and not ventured into the church. The building is stripped-down, whitewashed Gothic, begun in 1910 and not finished until the 1920s, World War One intervening. And opening the solid oak doors gave me a distant sight of the most spectacular English Gothic altar I've seen anywhere, let alone in Surrey. If you can hear a mysterious thump, it is the ghost of Percy Dearmer fainting and falling over.

I hadn't numbered St Thomas's mentally as a Catholic-end church, but clearly should have done. I had certainly never expected to find a gilded Virgin-and-Child over an altar anywhere in the Diocese of Guildford. This beautiful bit of kit I suspect incorporates, at the very least, some of the work of Christopher Webb, who was also responsible for a similar reredos at Shalford and who was a pupil of Sir Ninian Comper; Milford has the frame of another one.

At St Mary's, Frensham, as I groped around in the semi-dark unable to find a light switch, I found a card on the table reading 'This is a church where the Catholic Faith is taught'. The card looks like 1950s vintage and I wonder how accurate that statement actually is now.