All Saints', Weston Green

When posting about St Christopher’s Hinchley Wood a couple of weeks ago, I realised to my mortification that I had neglected to give an account of a similar kind of building in the same part of the county, All Saints’ Weston Green, which I in fact visited in the autumn of 2019! Weston Green church is a little earlier than Hinchley Wood, having been dedicated in 1939, and had a rather more distinguished designer, Sir Edward Maufe, whose works would also include, of course, Guildford Cathedral itself. But the building has many of the same features – a monumental simplicity, plain round arches, sedilia reduced to a basic outline, and the twin ambos either side of the chancel. Old photos show that originally the arrangements included a curtained English altar (as the temporary mission church which preceded it had – though not the same one, as that was smaller); but there was never provision for a choir, interestingly. The Lady Chapel has an integral aumbry and a piscina built into the windowsill, while the altar rails are very typically Maufe, almost exactly the same as the ones in the Cathedral, as is the piscina by the high altar. All Saints’ – and Hinchley Wood, and other churches such as SS Mary & George’s in Sands where I used to worship – fall into a distinct architectural and liturgical category that typified modern churches at that time, between the tail-end of Gothic and later experiments.