The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans,
clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact
between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with
weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a
year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I
haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to
welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called
a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend
any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event
yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a
session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities
for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of
encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim
of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St
Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual
content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and
thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building
we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my
great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one
of these.
David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a
cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite
substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style,
but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model
of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The
pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or
down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety
of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s
in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is
very strong.
Good Shepherd, Pyrford
St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)
Holy Spirit, Burpham
Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into
another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for
photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:
And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:
It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.
All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:
No comments:
Post a Comment