Ashtead Churches

Ashtead is now an evangelical parish but I wonder when it became that. It has two churches, an old parish church and an Edwardian chapel-of-ease. St Giles's, the old one, is an awkward, odd building, with a long and narrow nave-and-chancel and a huge north transept. Physically not much has happened to it since the days of the Revd William Legge, incumbent for 57 years, who was responsible for an extensive rebuilding which left only the tower untouched, including an elaborate wooden roof Pevsner describes as 'preposterous'. I wonder whether he was able to inspect the picture now on display of what the church used to look like before Mr Legge's restoration, packed with pews and with a roof so elaborate it beggars belief. 

Nobody could say the reconstruction wasn't grand. The woodwork includes massively solid choir stalls, carvings of the four evangelists on the stall-ends, and a western gallery allowing access to the bell chamber. 

But grandeur aside, there is nothing that unequivocally points in a Catholic direction. Look at the reredos: it's a Gothic riot of pinnacles and hood-mouldings, but also houses Tables of the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, just like the unrestored churches the Ecclesiologists were so keen to change. A nice altar frontal, though: the cross is dated 1907.

And there, St Giles's has virtually frozen apart from the importation of a bit of tech here and there, and a few comfy chairs in what is clearly a 'prayer corner' in the gargantuan north transept.

This means the more modern St George's is in fact the more interesting of the two. A completely unpretentious redbrick building opened in 1906, which Pevsner is actually reasonably complimentary about, it's been adapted to the needs of an evangelical congregation: a baptismal pool with a nice cover, all sorts of tech, and movable altar furniture made by a local woodworker. There's a prayer corner with sofas and a stack of Bibles, and a dais installed in the 1980s. 

But there are hints of something else having gone on here. The east window, installed in the 1960s, was designed by Christopher Webb, that one-time pupil of Ninian Comper, and there's a very unusual one of St Joseph the Worker, of all things. The area north of the chancel, so the church website says, was converted to a Lady Chapel in 1950, which it certainly isn't now.