Farnborough Churches

In Farnborough, one of those wild corners of the Diocese of Guildford beyond the Surrey border in Hampshire, there are (now) three Anglican churches. The modern Good Shepherd need not detain us long:

And nor need we linger at St Peter's, the old parish church in the centre of town. Architecturally it's interesting, and even has medieval wall paintings - three fragmentary female saints, none of them, sadly, St Catherine - but it hails from the Low-Church end of the spectrum and has been cleansed and purified inside, to a degree. How on earth did it get away with driving through a pair of massive transept extensions either side of the old chancel in the 1960s, linked to it by sort of flat neo-Tudor arches?

But then I found my way to St Mark's - a humble redbrick building of the 1880s and no great distinction. I knew it would be open thanks to a Christmas tree festival, but I didn't anticipate the congregation members on duty would ply their visitor with tea, leek-and-potato soup, and mince pies, and show him their photograph albums and describe the history of the church. Nor was I anticipating images of priests in birettas, statues and shrines amid the hazardously trailing cables feeding the fairy lights, or a sacristan proudly showing off the 'best thurible' she was just finishing polishing. The church hadn't been founded with an Anglo-Catholic tradition, I was told, but had acquired it in the 1920s. 'Some of the locals never forgave us'.

The great treasure of St Mark's isn't anything specifically to do with its tradition, but a side chapel displaying its link with military flying: the Royal Engineer Balloon School and its successor the Air Battalion, and finally the RAF's forerunner the Royal Flying Corps, were all based at Farnborough and this was their Garrison Church. The chapel is a memorial to the RFC dead of WW1, each fatality's name recorded on a separate plaque of rather nice oak (including a local woman who was killed on war work). It has a mock-Jacobean screen at the entrance and, either side of the altar, what are not riddel-posts but nearly, topped not as you might expect by angels but by knights. There are Knights Templar on little pillars either side of the High Altar too - conspiracy theories ahoy!

So I had much reason to feel warm to St Mark's. But I suspect all this may not last all that longer. Like a number of other old Anglo-Catholic churches I know, it has the signs of something that was once grand and spiritually enriching but which can't be sustained, like a clock running down. There was once a rood beam which was removed, I was told, because it had woodworm; the Lady Chapel is no more, its old baroque altar reredos now wedged behind a piano while Our Lady of Walsingham sits on a shelf, a bit forgotten; and, if you look carefully, you can see Jesus on the high altar has a broken halo. The church is in vacancy at the moment, but they know where their new incumbent is coming from: an evangelical church not far away.