Reasons for Designation
Abbey church of 1964-89, with integral cloistral buildings, to the designs of Francis Pollen. A striking, austere building that mixes classical and modern elements that is in the vanguard of both Brutalist and Liturgical thinking.
Details
WORTH
1144/0/10060 TURNERS HILL
16-NOV-07 Abbey Church of Our Lady Help of
Christians
GV II
Roman Catholic (Benedictine) Abbey church. 1964-89 with later additions to the conventual buildings, to the designs of Francis Pollen. Reinforced concrete frame clad in brick, with exposed concrete beams, floors and details. Tiled roofs, the central drum over the church is felted, but was designed to be tiled when money permits.
Clever plan on steeply sloping site. The hillside site makes the most of views out into the Sussex countryside. Central square church under central circular top-lit drum. Central altar with monastic choir and two chapels behind, with further chapel separate to side. The church is entered by the laity from an entrance at first floor level, which gives on to a long vestibule gallery, and imperial stair that descends to the main church level. This projects from the entrance facade and is flanked by entrance doors. The other three sides of the church are encased by one and two-storey buildings for the monks, with cells, refectory and library (not inspected but understood not to be of special interest). Side entrance from car park to left, with the entrance to the monastery further down the hill on this elevation. Doors and windows of heavy-sectioned timber, save those in the clerestory under the dome, which are set between the exposed concrete frame. Exposed, too, is the circular top of the drum, with features concrete gargoyles modelled on those by Le Corbusier at Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, and which is surmounted by a cross.
Vestibule and staircase lined in brick with exposed concrete beams and dressings, timber roofs. Round-arched openings to bookstall, stairs and into lobbies serving adjoining rooms. The austerity of the church interior enhances the sense of its great scale. Rear balcony of exposed concrete. Exposed beams to the slope of the drum with timber ceiling between, central concrete lantern supported on exposed ring beam and braced by internal cross of concrete beams. Battered brick piers with shallow concrete capitals define ambulatory round three sides. Raked floor leads to near-central altar; the difficulties of worship in the round are avoided by having the monks' choir behind the altar, together with two large side chapels - largely enclosed brick drums with curved and battered brick walls reminiscent of Oscar Niemeyer's work, to either side. Pierced opening over tabernacle behind the freestanding altar in each. Forward altar a single stone, resting on two piers and raised up three steps. Timber offices and confessionals set either side off the ambulatory. Foundation stone dated 1968; memorial stone to Francis Pollen (1926-87), and Dom Victor Farwell, first Abbot of Worth 1965-88. Plaque to Simon Dominic Woods, died 1972. The other interiors not inspected.
The Abbey of Our Lady, Help of Christians was founded at Worth in 1930 as a daughter house of the Benedictine Abbey at Downside, and with the same function of running a boys' boarding school. Pollen's first design, published in 1956, was for a tall, elliptical reinforced concrete building surrounded by an ambulatory with side chapels all the way around, and with a central circular lantern. In 1961 this was revised in favour of a central, square building surrounded by conventual buildings for fifty monks and ten novices. Pollen and his clients were thus in the vanguard of liturgical thinking among the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. His scheme was enlarged to provide seating for a congregation of 800, and the design took on its present form in 1963-4. The main concrete structure was built in 1964-5 by the contractor Lovells, but as local contractors were unwilling to commit themselves to a price for the curved brickwork, John Lyles, then teaching carpentry in the school, undertook the brickwork by direct labour, and supervised the completion of the building. The first service was held in 1970 and the church was consecrated in 1975, leaving the flanking buildings for later completion. As part of this use of direct labour, a pitched roof was preferred for the vestibule or narthex as cheaper and easier to build, and the surrounding buildings followed this more vernacular approach. This serves to make the central drum still more dramatic and space-ship like.
Francis Pollen was trained at Cambridge and the Architectural Association, but his early career was influenced by Edwin Lutyens, who had remodelled Lambay Castle in Dublin Bay for his grandparents and who remained a family friend. But in 1958 Pollen adopted the tenets of the New Brutalism, preferring heavy brick and concrete construction to what Alan Powers describes as the 'physical shallowness' of much contemporary modernism. In a more extreme way, Pollen's career mirrors that of Sir Basil Spence, who began his professional career with Lutyens and who went on to embrace the style of Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul; Worth Abbey is suggestive of what might-have-been had Spence designed a major church in the manner of his listed 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' (quoted in Architects' Journal, p.35). The debt to the Renaissance ideas of humanism and proportion expounded in Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, a key text of the Brutalists and of the Liturgical Movement, is as important as Pollen's own deep and personal Catholic faith. Powers has also made comparisons 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 one building that has successfully made a virtue of the most rigorous economy.
Sources
The Builder, 28 September 1956, pp.530-1
Architectural Review, January 1963, p.70
Alan Powers, 'Church Triumph' in Architects' Journal, 30 January 1991, pp.30-37
Alan Powers, Francis Pollen Architect, 1926-1987, Oxford, Robert Dugdale, 1999
