When did they stop building churches on housing estates?
Housing estates of a decent size tend to be built with a nucleus of necessary services - something retail, something educational, something medical, something recreational. But no longer churches.
Time was when even the smallest village had a church, such was the domination of religion in our society. As towns and suburbs grew they too were always built with churches, often of multiple denominations, these an essential part of the social fabric satisfying an innate spiritual need. But those needs faded and modern housing estates no longer include places of worship as a matter of course... shops yes, schools yes, surgeries yes, parks yes, but churches no.
And I wondered when that changed.
Here's an attempted answer using evidence from east and south London.
1930s: Becontree
They were still building churches in the 1930s. Several were built to serve the Becontree estate - then the world's largest - including St Vincent's, St Elisabeth's, St John's and St Mary's, the latter being Grade II listed. Religion wasn't initially high on the LCC's priority list, with concerns expressed in local papers that churches weren't being built to suit the speed at which tenants were moving in. But multiple sites were selected, multiple denominations were catered for and the estate is still well provisioned religiousbuildingwise.
1950s: Lansbury
This estate in Poplar was famously redeveloped as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Arguably its places of worship were replacements for previous churches destroyed in the war, for example the Trinity Independent Chapel on East India Dock Road, rebuilt after a V1 strike. But you can't look at the copper-topped Roman Catholic church dominating the top of Grundy Street and conclude the that provision of churches wasn't important here. Still at the very heart of the community.
1950s: New Addington
Parishioners didn't initially need a new church at the lower end of the estate because 11th century St Mary's in Addington Village was quite close enough, but at the top end St Edward's on Central Parade was added in 1957. Additional churches were sprinkled lower later, for example Good Shepherd on Dunley Drive in 1962. Further evidence of the importance of churches during this postwar period can be found in Hainault, at Harold Hill and out in London's first new towns for example Harlow and Stevenage.
1950s/1960s: Abbey Wood
Before there was Thamesmead there was the Abbey Estate - thousands of homes built on former MoD land to the northwest of the railway station between 1956 and 1959. It took until the mid-1960s to add its main church, that's William Temple on Eynsham Road, but it ticks all the postwar architectural boxes. Reinforced concrete frame, pyramidal roof, copper topping - perfect. What's more a short walk through the Memorial Garden takes you to its Roman Catholic counterpart, St David's, a striking but functional building of a similar age. This was originally meant to be a two-storey church hall but during construction plans changed. One wall contains thousands of coloured glass tiles, the saintly relief out front is fibreglass, and these are precisely the kind ofdelights you don't find any more on modern estates.
1960s/1970s: Thamesmead
Thamesmead proper is a much larger estate but planned religion plays a smaller role. On the Bexley side of the divide the sole provision was the Church of the Cross, a slope-roofed building which very much resembles a hall or community centre with a wooden cross out front. It was built in the early 70s at the end of Overton Road on the faultline between interwar semis and progressive flats, and supports ecumenical worship embracing Anglican, Methodist and United Reformed. A more explicit example of building-sharing is St Paul's, the chief church for everyone living north of the main road which was built in 1978. It contains one room for Anglican worship and another for Roman Catholic, separated only by a corridor, with the Catholic half presenting a stark polygonal brick face towards the street. The architects had high hopes of the building also being a community hub, which admittedly haven't quite worked out but at least they were still trying. A separate small Baptist church hides away on Titmuss Avenue, and later evangelical missions fit in wherever they can.
1980s: Beckton
As a mostly private estate, developers were more interested in providing homes than services. But they still added a church to serve this far-Docklands community, just the one, as part of the library/school/healthcentre cluster behind Asda. It's called St Mark's and like Thamesmead acts as home to both Anglican and Catholic congregations, but this time in the same space. Come at 9.45am on a Sunday and you get something CofE, then at 11.15 that turfs out and the Catholic priest hears confessions before a proper Mass at noon. The interior architecture is still church-focused with a crucifix and altar but elsewhere in the building are independent community centre activities, and this much more efficient use of available resources feels like a nod to the declining role of church provision.
1990s: Britannia Village
This pioneering estate in West Silvertown, home to many hundreds of owner occupiers and social tenants, was built without a church. People still worship here every Sunday but they go to the Village Hall, a building devoid of religious intent.
2000s/2010s: Greenwich Peninsula
North Greenwich's former gasworks gained its first flats at the start of the millennium and these continue to extend inexorably across an enormous area of land. They've built shops and schools and surgeries but nobody's specifically built a church, nor is there any intention to do so, despite an upcoming population running into many tens of thousands.
2010s/2020s: Olympic Park
And they're not building churches here either. In part this is because the Lower Lea Valley rubs up against multiple much older suburbs with pre-existing churches whose celebrants are only too eager to welcome Sunday migrants from adjacent flats, but mainly it's because there's no money in it.
People don't go to churches in the numbers they once did, and those that do often make do with halls and warehouses because giving praise is more important than what the walls look like. This is convenient because developers would much rather build a slew of homes than some sacred facility a few inhabitants might unprofitably use. There are already far too many churches, an imbalance that can be partially corrected by not building new ones.
When did they stop building churches on new housing estates? I'd say approximately 30-40 years ago, when social housing started to be replaced by private development, and they were already on the endangered list before that.
