Church Of St George

Church of St George, Worthing

The Church of St George was designed by George Truefitt and consecrated in 1868, consisting initially of a nave and chancel. The remaining components were added by 1884. The church was reordered in 1990–1.

The building is constructed of coursed local rubble with ashlar bands between the main windows and limestone dressings, with red clay tile roofs. The plan comprises a nave and chancel in one, a western narthex-porch, northeast and southeast vestries, a southeast organ chamber, a northeast aisle, and a north porch positioned in the angle between the aisle and nave.

The style draws freely upon thirteenth-century architectural motifs. The church is striking for its wide nave and chancel forming a single unified composition. The eastern end features a dramatic, broad semi-circular apse, while the western end has a hipped roof. Lower subsidiary parts are grouped around the main body, most significantly a small three-bay aisle (externally; two bays internally) on the northeast of the nave beneath its own east-west gable. This continues eastward under a lower roof-line to form a vestry terminating in a semi-circular apse that provides a diminutive counterpart to the main chancel apse. The western narthex-porch has north, south, and central doorways, with the latter under a gable. Hipped roofs appear extensively across the building: on the north porch, the western end of the chapel, the north and south ends of the narthex-porch, and the southeast vestry. Rising from the north side at the beginning of the apse is a small square bell-turret with short colonettes at the corners supporting a stone spirelet.

The fenestration is varied. The eastern end has five single-light windows each with a trefoil beneath a circular quatrefoil. The nave has three large two-light windows on either side comprising a pair of trefoiled lights beneath a large circle with very shallow cusping. At the western end is a row of six trefoil-headed lights filling the wall between the narthex-porch roof and the eaves, separated by square shafts. Remaining windows are trefoil-headed, arranged singly or in pairs. None feature hood-moulds. The southeast vestry is cheaply built with rendered walling and wooden windows, appearing to represent a temporary structure. The church has no clerestory and no parapets.

Internally, the large single vessel of nave and chancel forms an impressive unified space with no structural division between the two. The apse walls are decorated with fleuron diapering. On either side of the nave before the apse begin two depressed pointed arches on a high base with a central twin pier between carrying elaborate foliage carving. The arches on the north lead to the short northeast aisle. The western wall has three round-arches, the central one containing a doorway; on either side of these three arches is a further smaller doorway under a depressed pointed arch. The main roof is arch-braced to a collar with iron tie-rods, necessitated by the great width of the building; the roof panels have diagonal boarding. The upper parts of the nave walls and the apse are panelled with incised texts.

The principal interior feature is a screen that formerly marked the division between nave and chancel, now located at the western end with single lights of wiry Gothic tracery. At the western end are two pink round-headed marble tablets forming a First World War memorial. The reredos is wooden with a carved representation of the Last Supper. The font, dating from 1868, has an octagonal bowl with crosses on alternate faces and three marble shafts surrounding the stem. A memorial organ (dated to 1913) has two tall towers of pipes and occupies the easterly of the arches on the south side of the nave. Many nineteenth-century pews with shaped ends remain. Attractive nineteenth-century patterned stained glass appears in windows around the apse and at the western end.

A dark brick hall was built to the west in 1935–6; the foundation stone, laid 4 September 1935, notes the architect as Harold Overnell ARIBA. It features distinctively 1930s windows with tapering heads.

From its inception, St George's served a Low Church congregation, hence the broad, unified space of the nave and chancel, and the absence of iconography and subdivided spaces that might be expected in a church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The piecemeal nature of the building is evidenced by the temporary vestry on the south side, whose basic rendered and wooden-windowed structure was clearly intended to be replaced when funds permitted.

George Truefitt (1824–1902) was articled to architect L. N. Cottingham at fifteen for five years and later worked for Worcester architect Hervey Eginton. He became a FRIBA in 1860 and retired from practice in 1890, settling in Worthing where he died. His church work was undertaken for Evangelical clients. A major scheme was the development of the Tufnell Park Estate in Islington, London, in the late 1850s and 1860s, where he designed the remarkable circular church of St George.