Roman Catholic Church of Marychurch

Roman Catholic Church of Marychurch

A church completed in 1970 and designed by George Mathers, with glass by Dom. Charles Norris and Dom. Paulinus Angold, and a font and welded steel screens and gates by Angela Godfrey. The church is constructed of brown brick with some concrete and stone, a slate roof, and an aluminium spire.

The church is planned as a multi-faceted circle with a small projection to the west. The baptistery and entrances form a rectangle with hexagonal forms to either end.

The church appears encircled by wide brown-brick piers on concrete plinths. The upper third of each pier is white concrete, incised with evenly spaced vertical lines, rising above the eaves to form a broken parapet whose sloping top surface is glazed to allow light into the interior. Recessed between the piers are tall, narrow coloured-glass windows that rise for the full height of the brickwork, with a pale ochre section between the white concrete caps to the piers. The upper section of the south pier is taller, clad in slate, and contains three narrow rectangular openings. A small chapel projects from the west side with slightly splayed sides and a flat roof, rising to about half the height of the piers and employing the same materials in the same proportions. The chapel has coloured glass windows to north and south. The church roof is conical, surmounted by an aluminium-frame spire.

Projecting to west and east from either side of the north curve of the church are hexagonal entrance porches, the same height as the chapel. The top third of the walls are concrete, rising as a broken parapet above flat roofs. Four sides of each hexagon are external walls; the other two are inside the building and contain double doors opening into the back of the church. Two of the four external sides contain white panels between brick piers, while the other two contain long narrow panels of glazing, one side with double doors, one without. To either side of each entrance are panels of coloured glass.

Attached to the north-east corner above the east entrance is a single-storey flat-roofed wing containing parish rooms and offices. The same materials and colours are used, with high narrow windows captured between the white fascia and pale concrete band that forms the top of projecting brick panels, two to either side of a wide entrance.

The circular body of the church internally has a two-part domed ceiling: a smaller conical shape set at the centre of an outer dome and capped by a bullseye window. The altar is placed to the south on a forward projecting platform raised up by two shallow steps, with the floor raking up from the altar to the sides of the church. Around the wall, each external pier is expressed internally as a wood-panelled recess naturally lit from above. These wide recesses alternate with tall abstract intensely coloured glass panels, mainly in shades of green and blue with some yellow and orange, held between narrow brick piers. Only at the back of the sanctuary behind the altar does the recess contain glass to the sides in yellow, pale blue and grey. The domed ceiling rises from just above the glass panels.

The pattern of alternating recesses and glass panels is broken to the west, where the lower part of the recess opens into the Lady Chapel through wide plain-glass doors. Coloured glass panels to the north and south of the chapel, in paler colours than those around the main body of the church, represent respectively a beam of light and the Tree of Jesse or a lily. To the north of the church the lower part of the wall is open across an area spanning three recesses and four panels, the glass in the upper part of these containing images of the four evangelists in shades of red to yellow against a blue background. The church is open here to the baptistery and entrance porches, separated only by a welded steel screen with gates to the centre opening from the church onto the baptistry.

Opposite the gates is the font, an angular and irregular abstract structure cast in Creetown granite aggregate and set on a circular stone base, immediately above which is a circular lightwell. Behind the font the whole north wall of the baptistry contains a dramatic abstract scheme of coloured glass representing the Creation and the cosmos, at the centre of which is a cross of full height constructed of small panels each with an identical relief pattern in glass fibre. To east and west of the baptistery, either side of each porch, are coloured glass panels, that to the south of each porch representing to the east morning, and to the west evening. The bottom right-hand frame of the latter has been replaced.

To the east of the baptistery is the sacristy, which contains the panel of glass on the north side of the east porch and leads into the parish rooms in the north wing. These are plain and functional.