Ockham & Burgh Heath

My accounts of Surrey church visits are nearing their conclusion. A while ago I saw two very contrasting buildings. All Saints', Ockham, sits on its own in a very rural setting, with not a lot to show from the Oxford Movement and its successors apart from antiquarianism; although, rather as Church Crookham has the only shrine of Bd John Keble to be found anywhere, Ockham's choice to commemorate local lad the medieval philosopher William Ockham is presumably unique as well. Not quite unique, but next to it, is the church's great treasure alongside all its medieval and later bits and pieces, the amazing seven-light east window which may have come from Newark Abbey after the Dissolution. Even with recent glass in it, it renders the chancel an amazing, affecting space.

St Mary's Burgh Heath, in contrast, is a breezy Edwardian brick barn, but had a Catholic tradition in advance of its parent church of Banstead at the time of its building. In fact, it was the scene of a bit of conflict when Mrs Colman, one of the church's chief benefactors, kicked up such a fuss about the liturgy at St Mary's that a weekly Sung Eucharist was abandoned by the second week after opening in 1909 (there were still Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and a eucharist on All Souls' Day later in the year, though). From the 1980s Burgh Heath shifted further and further to the ecclesiological centre, and is now moderate Evangelical (which is what 'centre' currently means). The plaque in the photo refers, intriguingly, to a sanctuary lamp which is no longer there!

In 1923 the Colman family sold Nork House and left the area and their phalanx of reserved seats in the church. St Mary's celebrated its liberation by converting the space where the Colman pews had been into a Chapel of St Monica, fitted out by no less than Ninian Comper. Not that I've ever thought glass design was really the great man's strong point!