St Luke's Grayshott

What a pleasure, for the first time in more than 3 months, to be able to go into a church other than the one I look after! I had to go to Haslemere today and on the off chance detoured to Grayshott where St Luke's was open and two ladies welcomed me and pointed out the hand-sanitiser station. Now, you wouldn't describe this church as especially exciting a building: it's an ordinary late-Victorian edifice from 1900, paid for by some of the wealthy families whose big houses scatter the hills of this southwest extremity of Surrey. But it's a rare church that brings no interest.

The first incumbent of Grayshott, Mr Jeakes, appears in a photo in the church wearing an imperial collar and white tie, so he was probably Evangelical in persuasion, and the choir arrangements were fairly standard in churches of all varieties by the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. But in the late 1930s Charles Nicholson, who was usually associated with the Catholic movement, was brought in to do a modest refurbishment which involved installing a restrained carved and coloured reredos behind the altar, and linenfold oak panelling throughout the sanctuary. He also laid down a carpet in his trademark blue - not quite as overpoweringly 'vibrant' in reality as it seems in the photograph!

The church's windows are striking: several contain what are clearly portraits of real people, and there's a grim one showing the sacrifice of Isaac to commemorate an 18-year-old officer who died on the Western Front. Best of all, though, is the glass installed to celebrate the church's centenary:

A second upgrade came in 1961 with a range of windows depicting saints put into the north aisle and a small side chapel created at its east end in memory of Canon Ottley, fourth vicar of Grayshott, who'd died three years before. This is just yearning to be a Lady Chapel, but it hasn't quite got there. The image of the Holy Spirit in the tympanum is in low relief and the artist doesn't seem to be recorded.

In normal times, the liturgical diet at Grayshott majors on the Prayer Book (they even sing Choral Mattins), and you can't describe this as an Anglo-Catholic playground. Instead it shows what a moderate church was and wasn't prepared to do at different times in the 20th century.