Abbey Church Of Our Lady Help Of Christians

Abbey Church of Our Lady Help of Christians

A Roman Catholic Benedictine abbey church built between 1964 and 1989, designed by Francis Pollen, with later additions to the conventual buildings. The structure is a reinforced concrete frame clad in brick with exposed concrete beams, floors and details. The roof is tiled, except for the central drum over the church which is felted but was designed to be tiled when funds permitted.

The building occupies a steeply sloping hilltop site in Sussex, with the design taking advantage of views across the surrounding countryside. The church itself is a central square space beneath a central circular top-lit drum. The altar is positioned centrally with the monastic choir and two chapels behind it, and a further chapel positioned separately to the side. The laity enter at first-floor level through a vestibule gallery and an imperial staircase that descends to the main church level, this entrance projecting from the facade and flanked by entrance doors. The other three sides of the church are enclosed by one and two-storey buildings housing the monks' cells, refectory and library. A side entrance from the car park serves the left elevation, with the monastery entrance further down the hill on this same side. Doors and windows are of heavy-sectioned timber except those in the clerestory beneath the dome, which sit between the exposed concrete frame. The circular top of the drum features exposed concrete gargoyles modelled on those by Le Corbusier at Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, France, and is crowned by a cross.

The vestibule and staircase are lined in brick with exposed concrete beams and dressings, and timber roofs. Round-arched openings lead to a bookstall, stairs and lobbies serving adjoining rooms. The church interior is notably austere, emphasising the sense of great scale. A rear balcony of exposed concrete runs across the back, with exposed beams following the slope of the drum and a timber ceiling between. A central concrete lantern is supported on an exposed ring beam and braced by an internal cross of concrete beams. Battered brick piers with shallow concrete capitals define an ambulatory on three sides. The floor slopes towards a near-central altar, while a monks' choir positioned behind the altar and two large side chapels—largely enclosed brick drums with curved and battered walls reminiscent of Oscar Niemeyer's work—address the challenges of worship in the round. Each chapel has a pierced opening over the tabernacle behind its freestanding altar. A forward altar of single stone rests on two piers and is raised three steps. Timber offices and confessionals are set either side of the ambulatory. A foundation stone is dated 1968. Memorial stones commemorate Francis Pollen (1926–87) and Dom Victor Farwell, first Abbot of Worth (1965–88), and a plaque records Simon Dominic Woods, died 1972.

The Abbey of Our Lady Help of Christians was founded at Worth in 1930 as a daughter house of Downside Abbey, serving the same purpose of running a boys' boarding school. Pollen's first design, published in 1956, proposed a tall elliptical reinforced concrete building surrounded by an ambulatory with side chapels all round and a central circular lantern. This was revised in 1961 in favour of a central square building surrounded by conventual buildings for fifty monks and ten novices. Pollen and his clients were thus at the forefront of liturgical thinking within the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. The scheme was enlarged to accommodate a congregation of 800, and the design took its present form in 1963–4. The main concrete structure was constructed in 1964–5 by the contractor Lovells. As local contractors declined to commit to a price for the curved brickwork, John Lyles, then teaching carpentry at the school, undertook the brickwork using direct labour and supervised the completion. The first service was held in 1970 and the church was consecrated in 1975, with the flanking buildings completed later. The pitched roof of the vestibule or narthex was adopted as part of this direct-labour approach, being cheaper and easier to build, and the surrounding buildings followed this more vernacular approach, which serves to make the central drum still more dramatic and spaceship-like.

Francis Pollen trained at Cambridge and the Architectural Association. His early career was influenced by Edwin Lutyens, who had remodelled Lambay Castle in Dublin Bay for his grandparents and remained a family friend. In 1958 Pollen adopted the tenets of New Brutalism, preferring heavy brick and concrete construction to what has been described as the 'physical shallowness' of much contemporary modernism. In a more extreme way, Pollen's career parallels that of Sir Basil Spence, who began professionally under Lutyens and later embraced the style of Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul; Worth Abbey suggests what might have resulted had Spence designed a major church in the manner of his listed design for Sussex University. Pollen himself wrote: 'I believe that churches must feel as if they had just happened as a result of divine laws of geometry, mechanics and proportion, timeless laws.' The debt to Renaissance ideas of humanism and proportion expounded in Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism—a key text of both the Brutalists and the Liturgical Movement—is as important as Pollen's own deep personal Catholic faith. Comparisons have been made with Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church at Rochester, New York. The artist Patrick Reyntiens considered that Pollen had 'produced singlehanded a style that has reference to the past and can give hope for the future' with its mixture of modern and primitive forms and austere control of space. It is a building that has successfully made a virtue of the most rigorous economy.