Church Crawling Round Woking

Woking is a bit of an evangelical wasteland as far as churches are concerned but that doesn't mean there is no interest to be found in them. St Mary of Bethany, southwest of the town centre, is a church I've visited before, but not in the daylight; and coming upon its lumpen redbrick mass on a dull early afternoon is not the most aesthetically pleasing experience I've ever had. Within it turns out to be another of the churches that has reoriented itself 90 degrees and so has an altar against the long wall. The old chancel is relegated to the side, forming a chapel. 

The biggest church in the town is Christ Church, a great redbrick barn of a place, though not as architecturally hard-headed as St Mary of Bethany, and which sits quite pleasingly in the shiny Jubilee Square in the centre of town. Here they haven't rearranged the interior because it's so wide it didn't need it, but it's clear that at Christ Church we are, liturgically speaking, back in the mindset of 18th-century Anglicanism, in which the church is a means of keeping people dry while they do religious things, rather than a sacred space in any sense. You'd be forgiven for thinking the piano and the drum kit are the main points of interest, although there is an altar, and we'll come to that in a minute.

I've been in Christ Church for diocesan events umpteen times: it's big, well-equipped, and central, which is why it is so favoured. Yet until I had a determined poke around I'd never noticed the remaining signs of what it used to be. The great apsidal chancel has piscina and sedilia, so you could easily celebrate a Solemn High Mass here if you wanted to ...

... and stuck round a corner is this very pleasing reredos, another sub-Comper effort with the deep azure tone of a 15th-century manuscript ...

The reredos was installed behind the high altar in 1926, and the piscina and sedilia are part of the original fabric built in 1889. Now, it is true that late-Victorian church-building was dominated by High Church Gothic Revivalists and so these features would, perhaps, have been standard at the time, but Christ Church was a cheap job too - in so far as its size allowed - and I do wonder whether strict Low-Church principles and economy would both have conspired to rule them out. Such a consideration doesn't apply to the reredos. Either fitments of this kind were so much part and parcel of Anglicanism in the 1920s that nobody thought more of it, or the tradition of Christ Church has undergone an abrupt change at some point. (The original architect, just for interest, was WF Unsworth, who didn't build many churches but was responsible for the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, which looked like something out of The Castle of Otranto).

There are little elements at Christ Church which nod in a different direction. Everyone now seems to have a Paschal Candle to light during baptisms, while Rublev's Trinity icon is ubiquitous, no matter the tradition of the church:

A final point which illustrates how difficult it can be to gauge the sense of a church from its fittings and furniture. Christ Church has a modern altar, a near-circular table that sits in the middle of the great apse on a slate dais. Although the wood is of no great quality, you might see something very like this in a church of almost any tradition or denomination, from modern Roman Catholic to open-minded nonconformist.

I was lucky to meet the Director of Ordinands who, despite his surprise to see me, let me in to St Mary of Bethany to have a look around. I don't necessarily expect suburban evangelical Anglican churches to be open to visitors, so it was no shock that St Paul's, Oriental Road, was locked, but I was most disappointed not to be able to get in to St Mary's, Horsell, a far more villagey-type church on the north of the town. It looks as though I will have to arrange my crawling in advance. 

PS. It suddenly struck me that Christ Church's baptismal pool must be under that wooden cross in the middle of the dais, so the altar must be capable of being slipped out of the way when need be. Very economical.