Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley

Crawley was founded in the early 13th century as a market town, and a church dedicated to St John the Baptist was founded a century later. The town lay partly in the parish of Ifield, a neighbouring village: the parish boundary ran up the middle of the wide High Street. After the English Reformation, Anglicanism predominated in the area, Protestant Nonconformity also became well established, and Roman Catholicism was almost unknown. A survey in 1582 found that two inhabitants of Ifield parish were recusants. By the mid-19th century, the centuries-old hostility towards Roman Catholicism held by many Anglicans in Sussex had faded, and conversions from the established Church to Catholicism…

Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was an "eclectic, imaginative and inventive" architect whose designs were rational rather than whimsical, but still had decorative touches and variety. Brick was his favoured building material, and the Friary Church is "instantly recognisable" as one of his designs. The cruciform structure is a large but low-set building of dark greyish brick with some intricately detailed red-brick courses. The roof is laid with pantiles. The main entrance, a round-arched doorway in a slightly recessed bay, sits below five tall, narrow windows with elaborate tracery; the brickwork surrounding these is diapered. Inside, the ceiling of the long nave is of concrete, painted and…

]] ]] The Friary Church was listed at Grade II by English Heritage on 25 October 2007; this defines it as a "nationally important" building of "special interest". As of February 2001, it was one of 85 Grade II structures, and 100 listed buildings and structures of all grades, in the Borough of Crawley. English Heritage regards it as architecturally important as it is one of the best works by Goodhart-Rendel, an "eminent" ecclesiastical architect, and historically significant both as an "important component of the dramatic expansion of the town in the mid-20th century" and as a piece of postwar planning. The regular expansion of the town from the 1950s to the 1980s, which saw new…