Church Of The Resurrection Of Our Lord Jesus Christ And Of The Blessed Virgin Mary, West Malling Abbey

Church of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, West Malling Abbey

This is an abbey convent church built between 1964 and 1966 by the architects Maguire and Murray. The building represents a striking modern addition to the medieval West Malling Abbey complex.

The church is constructed with concrete block walls incorporating reinforced concrete ring beams at the top of the walls and drum. The lower roofs use reinforced concrete slabs with internal board-marked finish and are clad in pantiles, while the timber upper roof, stained green and blue, is tile-clad. The building comprises a rectangular church space beneath a distinctive cylindrical upper drum, which Maguire likened to a 'double oast-house'. The church features round-arched clerestory windows that pivot but lack external frames, and another ring of glazing runs through the roof. A funnel-shaped top-light illuminates the interior.

A single-storey nuns' entrance and chapel connect to the cloister to the south, designed by Maguire and Murray. A separate side chapel for guests stands to the north with its own entrance and interview room, accessed from the grounds through pine boarding. The guest chapel entrance and interview room are wrapped around the chapel itself, fully glazed above low sills, with a large porch. Ralph Beyer designed an inscription on Edgehill stone commemorating the architects and builders, and also created the foundation stone.

The nuns enter the church through a Norman door, which was largely blocked by Maguire and Murray. In 1972, six columns were inserted in the interior. The body of the church has a low seat around its edge, a paved floor levelled in 1972, and a forward altar, foreshortened in 1972. Maguire and Murray's nuns' stalls are severely geometric in style and made of beech-faced blockboard, while the guest chapel has simpler bench seating and cork flooring. Lighting comes from hanging glass spheres. In the entrance chapel, a Doulton firkin vat set in concrete serves as a stoup and occasionally as a font.

The convent at St Mary's Abbey, West Malling, was founded around 1090 by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester. In 1892 the Abbey was refounded by Charlotte Boyd. The present Anglican Benedictine community moved to this location in 1916 from Baltonsborough near Glastonbury, Somerset. The new abbey church was made possible by a legacy from Marjorie Forbes Close, a leader in the revival of Anglican plainsong, given in memory of her mother. The building is sited on the crossing of the original abbey church and is accessed via the new cloister, though joined to the surviving transept where the nuns previously held their services.

This church is important as the most geometrically pure of all Maguire and Murray's churches. Maguire drew inspiration from Renaissance sources revealed by Rudolf Wittkower, his tutor at the Architectural Association in the early 1950s and author of The Centrally Planned Church in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949). The movement from rectangular to cigar-shaped space was originally more dramatic, but an engineering miscalculation necessitated the installation of columns in 1972. Maguire and Murray were among the first Anglican architects to challenge conventional church planning from liturgical first principles, expressed in rigorously geometrical form. The church provides a remarkable modern contrast to the Grade I medieval abbey west front and transept, and other surviving conventual buildings, yet maintains continuity through traditional materials and craftsmanship organised in a modern way.