St Christopher's Church, Bare

It was my aunt who remarked how incongruous St Christopher’s Church at Bare, Morecambe, appeared. Surrounded by middle class, interwar housing, the feel of the district is art deco, not gothic. Morecambe is an essential Victorian and twentieth-century town; nowhere are medieval buildings available to be seen. Yet this parish church, on the very sea front, is built as though it were fifteenth-century with sixteenth-century window styles. Despite being built in 1933, it would have looked fairly modern in 1533.

Art deco churches do exist, but the Church of England never really built them, sticking with the gothic revival which had been popular the previous century. Perhaps it was like one of those old ladies who reaches a certain age and decides not to bother updating her style any more. So whether it was just an inherent conservatism on the designer’s part, or a conscious decision to hark back to a better age, I cannot tell. Although I have a fondness for the 20s and 30s, Britons then were recovering from the horrors of the Great War, and anticipating the terrors of the Second. The age of the dictators had already begun, and by September, 1933, when Percy Herbert, Bishop of Blackburn, officially opened the building, the continent’s third, and most wicked tyrant was in place, bawling into microphones, while the dogs of war began to find their favourite scent. All of that was a few years off, and Morecambe was a prosperous holiday destination, its music halls and theatres attracting the nation’s greatest stars. Yet this church building resolved to step out of its contemporary era, to remind its worshippers and passers-by that its gospel was older than the times and more ancient than that which is fashionable.

As this new year begins, increasing numbers of churches will try to be 'contemporary' to the fashions of this awful century. More fool them.