The Churches of Cove

The Hampshire-yet-Guildford parish of Cove is another where an established old church is less interesting from our point of view than a new one. The former is St John the Baptist, built in 1844 supposedly in imitation of the Hospital of St Cross near Winchester, a pleasing but not spectacular church with the usual sort of flashy high-Victorian reredos and not a bad nave altar as these things go, plus some very odd details such as a font cover topped with a weird sort of winged urn thing, and a wooden screen of round-headed arches in the transept.

But then I went to what is now Christ Church, between Cove and Farnborough centre. This was built as St Christopher’s in 1934, and represents Gothic boiled down to its absolute essentials. There is a tall tub-shaped font very typical of the time, and a dramatic east end now rendered a bit of a liturgical backwater behind the nave altar on its dais, a somewhat paltry little table, I’m afraid, compared even to the straightforward one at St John the Baptist’s. Five years after its construction St Christopher’s gained a plaque depicting its patron saint, and it seems to have got its aumbry to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1984. I was rather taken aback by the pentagram-style light fittings, and the church feels quite uncomfortable about them too!

There was a third church in Cove: it was an Anglican congregation that used the Southwood Community Centre from its construction in 1993. In 2019 it ceased to exist as a separate grouping and the members relocated to St Christopher’s, which was renamed Christ Church.

Although we see that the sacrament was once reserved at Christ Church – to judge from experience I wouldn’t like to bet that it is now! – and it had an image of its one-time patron saint, I’ve never seen it referred to as a particularly Catholic church. Instead it shows where expectations of any new church in the mid-20^th century lay.