The fundamental impressions St Mary's Long Ditton left me with were grandeur and cleanliness: its surfaces shine and nothing seems out of place. It isn't one of my 'core' churches but the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, so perhaps it reached a degree of soundness even later than The Church Traveller's Guide could reveal. It's what the church was designed for, with those sedilia. Nobody could describe that mighty pink marble reredos as beautiful, but it impresses by sheer force.
It has an elegant Lady Chapel where the Sacrament resides behind a brass aumbry door decorated very pleasingly with the Sacred Heart, though the altar cross and candlesticks are the spindly, spiky kind beloved of the 1960s and 70s. Why does it have a brass set as well?
Some of the glass is obviously Kempe ...
... and some isn't. Just because it's modern doesn't mean it's bad, though.
The passage of Long Ditton up the candle isn't clear to me (as yet), but St Peter's West Molesey was a 3-star church in the 1933 Guide and then hit four stars in 1948, staying there afterwards. It used to have an east window of three lancets given to the church by a priest called William Giffard, who may have been the Rector of Weybridge responsible for the dreadfully unpopular decision to demolish that church and set it on an Anglo-Catholic path: the window was part of the wholesale rebuilding of St Peter's in 1843. Not that it was St Peter's then: it had no dedication until Fr Arthur Sydenham (1927-42) realised the building was aligned to the sunrise on St Peter's Day. Fr Sydenham was responsible for carving the church's reredoses with his own fair hand. The Stations look Faithcraft to me, probably dating to the same time. His tradition - if he was the one that introduced it - was cemented by the very long incumbency of Fr John Yeend (1949-97) who was responsible for installing the altar steps and rearranging the Lady Chapel in 1996 in memory of his wife. West Molesey is lovely, but it does have that slight feeling of bitty overkill you sometimes meet in Anglo-Catholic churches - why are there two tabernacles, for instance? It is beautifully well-kept, though now part of an Evangelical parish who seem content to polish brass, dust woodwork, and light candles, but may have little idea of the actual spirituality behind them all.
St Peter's last Catholic incumbent was the lovely Peter Tailby, a man of such gentle and transparent saintliness that I and Il Rettore used to try and sit next to him at diocesan events because we felt embarrassed at the mere idea of misbehaving if he was around.
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