Hale Well Met

Oh dear, it was some months ago now that I went to the churches of Hale but I have neglected to say anything about them here. And both St John's and St Mark's are so interesting, too. 

Both churches - St John's is the earlier and grander, dating to 1844 and paid for by Bishop of Winchester Charles Sumner - were built to serve the expanding suburbs north of Farnham. The monumental mock-Norman St John's has had a strong Catholic tradition in the past and is the only place locally I have seen an integral sacring bell, which you can see in the photo of the statue - I suppose that must depict St John, though it's an unaccustomedly muscular vision of him if so. That Marian and Eucharistic woodcarving in the Lady Chapel must be pretty modern, and the Angelus still appears on the wall. What the Evangelical Bishop Sumner would have made of that I can't imagine. 

In contrast to its smart suite of offices and meeting rooms, St Mark's a little north of St John's is a bit of a mess, but you can tell it's a beloved mess. It was paid for by the congregation itself in 1883; as the daughter church it never attained the heights of four-star status, as St John's did. It has a sole sanctuary lamp, though. That bit of white concrete in the photo is where the font used to be (it was replaced by a little glass basin which you can see in the fourth picture below), and there are marks of choir stalls in the floor. The congregation is doing its best to use the church as a community resource for events, art, and the like. I think that window of St Mark must surely be by the same artist as the one of the BVM at St John's; and isn't that altar frontal unusual? 1960s, perhaps?

But the great treasure of St Mark's is the wall paintings, the work of one Kitty Milroy, who lived in the area between 1902 and 1911. There is an Annunciation scene and angels behind the altar, but the rest of the images are seasonal, allegorical, and landscapes: Miss Milroy used various local people as her models. They've recently been restored and are thoroughly remarkable, all the more so for their presence in a thoroughly ordinary, inexpensive suburban church.

Outside you can see the old font, weirdly islanded in the garden. It isn't even used as a bird-bath.