Camberley Religion

A clean sweep of the Camberley churches – well, almost – the other day was completed by going home along the B3411 and gaining access to two more, so it was quite a haul. Not that the Camberley district presents us with anything very Anglo-Catholic now, though there are hints of what might once have been. The whole area used to be part of the sprawling parish of Ash which, from the 1500s, included a timbered chapel of St Peter at Frimley; this was rebuilt in the 1820s and became a parish church in its own right in 1866. By that time the military town of Yorktown/Camberley was growing up to the north, graced with its own church of St Michael which was eventually separated from St Peter’s, and both churches produced daughters in the decades afterwards.

Let’s go to St Peter’s, Frimley, first. The VCH describes the tower as ‘debased’ and Pevsner characterises the interior as ‘awful’: but its sheer ‘awfulness’ affords some interest in the form of its galleries and wall-benches, which the Ecclesiologists would have swept away given the chance. The reredos shows that even what must have been a relatively Low church could by 1880 install marble and a carved cross and not feel too many pangs of conscience. But the church benefits from a nice reordering done in 2011: I am not generally fond of this spindly style of altar furniture but at Frimley it looks quite dramatic against the lit east end.

The mother church of Camberley, and daughter in its turn to Frimley, is St Michael’s, Yorktown. I couldn’t actually get in on my visit, and the best I could do was peer through a locked door, but it’s a big, if unremarkable middle-of-the-road church. The building is one of Henry Woodyer’s, and, once completed with a spire forty years after being opened, sits lowering very handsomely over the town. Or it would, if it were not now screened by trees and a gigantic wall bordering the A30 which makes it sadly hard to see from nearby, though the spire pokes up as soon as you draw away. Looking at images of the interior available online I can’t see anything north of Victorian floral-and-choral.

I was much luckier with St Michael’s clutch of offspring churches. The earliest of these that survives is St Paul’s. This began as a flint Brethren chapel built by a Camberley wine merchant called Thomas Boyes; when Boyes sold out to a staunch Anglican called Mr Fowler some time before 1895 the building was passed to the vicar of Camberley, and was replaced in 1903 by the present redbrick and timber fabric designed by WD Caroe (and it looks it). The main part of the building is nothing but a barn, looking even emptier under covid restrictions – ‘the inside never given a thought’, says Pevsner – its walls austerely adorned with the monuments of military gentlemen. But the sanctuary, behind the red-carpeted dais which now bears the altar table, is a genuinely exciting architectural space. The heavy carved furniture reminds me of West Byfleet’s, and behind the red curtain (part of a set of post-WW2 amendments) are two regular holes in the wall either side of the altar – I wonder what they were? The old font is marooned outside, which is a bit of a shame.

St Mary’s is on the west side of the town, and dates to 1937. Here we find more timber, and if the interior looks a bit confused, this is because it’s been rearranged repeatedly. The liturgical east end was originally at what is now the back, which explains why it’s set a step higher than the rest of the floor, and then the building was orientated to one of the long walls. Now the congregation has decided the altar should go at the opposite end to its original location, and are waiting to see whether it’s safe to remove the pillar which is currently right in front of it. There is some nice mid-century glass.

Back north of the main road is St Martin’s. There was a church opened in what is now the hall in 1961, but the current building was consecrated in 1993. Nobody would claim it as a gem, and it’s pretty much an empty space in which churchy things can happen rather than a sacred space in which secular things can happen. But it’s actually rather a pleasure to be able to get into a modern church at all as these are the ones most likely to be shut. Two sofa areas, I was told, have been introduced during the pandemic, though I can’t see the connection as I would have thought sofas would be the last thing you’d want. We had one at Swanvale Halt for a while but it attracted tramps and after I had to clean up vomit behind it before an 8am mass one Sunday I concluded it had to go.

St Andrew’s, Frimley Green, was a stroke of luck: I met the incumbent who was going in to do a short job and my photography and his task took exactly the same amount of time. Frimley parish set up an iron church here in 1889, replaced by the current redbrick one in 1911, ‘looking like it was bought at Liberty’s’ as Pevsner can’t resist remarking, and it continues Camberley’s theme of timbers (with some unfortunate steel cross-ties).

Now, apart from Mr Woodyer’s presence at St Michael’s and the sedilia at St Paul’s, it looked as though the Catholic movement passed the entire district by without a second glance, but at St Andrew’s I spotted a curtained aumbry by the altar. Experience has taught me that aumbries don’t necessarily have anything in them, so I asked whether they reserved the Blessed Sacrament in the church. The answers ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ I was prepared for, but not the one I received, which was ‘We try not to’, a remark whose actual meaning I am still turning over in my mind. Meanwhile the entrance lobby at St Paul’s has a photo of the clergy (and everyone else in the church) taken a few years ago, which shows them wearing an extraordinary costume of black preaching scarves, embroidered as though they were stoles, over cassock-albs, and I don’t know what to make of that, either (the swirly flames in the photos are faces blurred out).

If there was ever a church in the area which had a Catholic identity, it’s the long-vanished St George’s (1893-1967). If so it would repeat the pattern we see elsewhere of a daughter church being able to advance further than its parent. It was designed by Arnold Hoole, who’d got the job of completing the spire of St Michael’s and who had a fondness for ironwork screens, tall altars and candlesticks, and altar crosses that were straining to become tabernacles. We can see this in his design drawings and the only photo I can find of the interior of St George’s; and in his other church, the very Anglo-Catholic St Michael’s Beckenham (bombed out in 1944 and since rebuilt in a very different style). I’d be surprised if Camberley hadn’t once had any church in this tradition.