That's a gem, anty, and unknown to me.

SS Teulon?  Evan Christian? Lamb?

The presence of galleries is a sure sign that it was not built in the Tractarian (Oxford Movement, High Church) tradition and the style is utterly bizare and not accurate gothic at all.

But the prominent new central altar, and the use of Taize services imply it is not currently conventional evangelical, rather liturgically minded catholic, (although I bet they don't use the c word.)  Although the "contemporary music" rings warning bells.  I haven't a clue what Grace style is.

North or South of the Thames?

I have now in Pevsner North West London.  St Mary's, St Mary's Road Ealing.  The medieval parish church rebuilt  J Horne, 1735, remodelled S S Teulon 1866.  "Now instead of Horne's modest preaching box at the end of this quiet backwater of modern Ealing, one has the overweening landmark of Teulon's eccentrically elephantine W tower....  Archbishop Tait called the alterations "the conversion of a Georgian monstrosity into the semblance of a Constantinopolitan basilica.""

Martle and GG persist in posting pictures of me in a genuine Constantinopolitan basilica, so I will not repeat it. Although I see what Archbishop Tait meant, I would say St Mary's is not really Byzantine.  The windows are a Victorian take on Gothic windows, and the pillars and roof beams are C19 industrial. 

O and St Mary's Ealing is definitely evo.  Good they are doing Taize services.

For the record this is a genuine Byzantine church (St Sergius and Bacchus.)

I was just being descriptive.  The original quote from Pope is much more telling "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer."  I don't think that's me.

For Taize, here we go - the sort of protestants Popes prefer.  The founder got shot in the church a couple of years ago.  I have been there, and it is the most atmospheric tent I know.  I'm a bit past it now.

http://www.taize.fr/

I was here last week, deep in the heart of IGI country.

I will be away for a day or so, but in the meantime here is this gem.  IGI will probably know where it is.  I will fill in more when I come back from Wales later in the week.


It has a connection with one of A's favourite novelists (not mine, although I expect I have read more of him than most here.)

A Don Carlos connection?  That's wonderful.

I read in the guide book about the lectern with the parrot head, and indeed took a few pics to illustrate it.  It seems deeply unconvincing.  If your are NOT meant to read the Bible as a parrot, then surely you do not put a parrot on the Bible desk?  It seems much more likely that the medieval carver had never seen an eagle.

And the Victorian novelist?  (I can ask questions, too.)

Don't bother.  A likes them and I have read all the Barchester and political series in my time.  OK for long train journeys.  Costume soap operas to my mind.

(I suppose Trollope is to Dickens, Thackery or George Eliot what Donizetti is to Verdi, Bellini or Rossini.)

Here is the South chancel chapel


Very heavy zig zag decoration on the vault ribs - I don't remember anything like it, and if I was told it was a design by the Victorian restorer, William Butterfield*, I would not be amazed.  It is almost a parody of Romanesque.

The altar painting invisible in my flash was the gift of an C18 warden and is C16 Flemish.er

Pevsner says of the lectern "a splendid wooden eagle."  The more I think of it, I don't take the parrot theory at all.

The light on the left side marks the aumbry, or wall safe for the consecrated bread of the eucharist to be kept for taking to the sick or dying.

* Butterfield was a particularly heavy handed Victorian architect - Keble College Oxford or All Saints near Oxford Circus.