Awesome space

Next week I am looking forward to being on my annual cell group retreat at Worth Abbey with several of those with whom I trained at NTMTC. One of the real delights on being on retreat at Worth is simply being in the awesome space that is the Abbey Church and listening to the monks sing their daily prayer.

The Abbey Church can seat up to 1,400 people, the largest capacity of any church in Sussex. The foundation stone was laid in 1964, the Church was consecrated in 1974 and the exterior structure completed in 2001. The interior furnishing remains incomplete. To achieve an open space on such a scale, the architect employed a bridge building technique never before used in a church. This modernist design by Francis Pollen is considered by many to be the finest example of 1960’s church architecture in Britain.

Francis Pollen, who died in 1987, was the architect responsible for most of the alterations to old buildings at Worth and for the design of most of the new ones. Pollen studied architecture at Cambridge. While still an undergraduate, he designed a beautiful chapel for a Carmelite convent which could not afford an architect. In his early days he was influenced by the ideas of a great British architect, Lutyens. Afterwards, he was a partner in the firm of Brett, Pollen and Bosanquet. Among church buildings, he designed a remarkable extension to a neo-Gothic church by Pugin at Marlowe-on-Thames. He considered Worth Abbey church his greatest achievement.

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Billy Preston - That's The Way God Planned It.