Cuddington and Stoneleigh

By the time you get to Cuddington, you’re well into the outer London suburbs, and it feels very much like the Diocese of Southwark rather than Guildford. St Mary’s, Cuddington, has a dramatic situation: you ascend up a long, straight road in Worcester Park, The Avenue, and gradually approach the apsed east end of the church, spiky and redbrick in an acute angle between roads. Cuddington had a church in the Middle Ages, but that was demolished and lost, leaving it in the odd position of being a parish with a patron and a (lay) rector but no church. An iron church was erected in 1867 and, nearly thirty years after that, the current ambitious building appeared, mainly paid for by one lay sponsor. This gentleman, Charles Smith, was a wealthy furrier who had left Malden church after ‘a disagreement with the vicar’: it would be nice to know more about him, because St Mary’s is an odd case. Its predecessor was served by priests from the Additional Curates’ Society, a Tractarian organisation, and the church looks like a pretty Tractarian building, its chancel gorgeous with encaustic tiles, mosaic, gilding and marble. Yet somehow for much of its life it has thought of itself as Low-Church. Once, in fact, during discussions about the reorganisation of parishes in the area, St Mary’s earnestly requested not to be lumped in with the Cheam churches to the north as it was the only one locally serving the needs of low-churchpeople: that might have reflected more its view of Cheam than anything else. Its main service on Sunday remained Sung Mattins all the way through to 1973 and the very full parish history I was kindly given a copy of hints at conflict in the 1940s with an incumbent who saw the future of the church differently; when the Sacrament was first reserved in 1961 there was quite some disquiet at this ‘high church’ innovation. Cuddington now is slightly on the Catholic side of middle, hence the maintenance of the aumbry and the presence of the statue of St Francis.

St John the Baptist, Stoneleigh, is a daughter church of Cuddington, founded along with St Francis, Ruxley, in the 1930s and both named after the incumbent’s sons! I found it really exciting, a dramatically simple but - structurally, at least - emphatically Catholic space (look at those sedilia) bound together by broad arches, white walls and a blue floor. The small side chapel (not, I think, a Lady Chapel as such) has the Sacrament reserved; there are twin ambos, a fashion we see in many churches built at this time; and there is a welcome green stack of the English Hymnal in a cabinet. I bet they don’t use them, any more than, sadly, they use that glorious massive altar, big enough, as my old vicar Fr Batley used to say, ‘to sacrifice an ox’, preferring a spindly little table even though the old altar can easily be seen from anywhere in the church. But Stoneleigh church sits in the midst of an unsuspecting 1930s housing estate, a defiant statement of another and heavenly reality.