Four Northwest Surrey Churches

I’d been trying for ages to visit Christ Church, Ottershaw, and finally managed it a couple of weeks ago, along with a group of other churches in northwest Surrey. Every church should have someone who takes a particular interest in its history, and Ottershaw has Sheila Binns who kindly showed me around. Her theory is that the church wasn’t built as an estate church or an ordinary chapel-of-ease as such, but a memorial to the young son of the lord of the manor, and this explains its strange location, the references to the Ascension in its decoration, and the dedication on the font, which you can only see when you are prone on the floor beside it.

Christ Church has never been at the forefront of the Catholic movement but it has a splendid bit of kit in the form of its gigantic Kempe reredos. This is something of a mixed blessing as it obscures the original windows in the east end; Mrs Binns reckons ‘Kempe’s workshop must have had it hanging around’ and from the local records Kempe seems to have persuaded the churchwardens that it was something they really, really needed in their church at the same time as having a new set of windows installed.

All Saints’ New Haw is a charming though now unremarkable little church. It secured four stars in Fr Blagdon-Gamlen’s Guide of 1973, but I can’t even see where an aumbry for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament might have been.  

Meanwhile, at Egham Hythe, St Paul’s is a monumental great structure with a pyramidal steeple which seems far, far too big for the building, and a new altar installed in about 2000 which seems far, far too small. The incumbent told me that the main donor, Mr Budgen of grocery fame, sought assurance from the bishop that St Paul’s would not be ‘a party church’, but it was fairly quickly a firm part of the Catholic movement. It still has the signs – icons, statues, reserved sacrament, and an old high altar with six candlesticks. But St Michael has been banished from the shelf he used to occupy into the vestry, for unclear reasons.

St John’s Egham is definitely Protestant, and there is no mistaking what it thinks from the inscription of 1820 over the door. Its satisfyingly grim monuments are not our concern here: it has a baptismal pool beneath a dais installed in about 1999 (which many years ago I saw actually in use!) and a very striking and unexpected painting of the Adoration of the Magi put behind the altar after a fire in 1950. The old altar is covered up now, but that marble suggests it’s a remarkable piece in its own right.