10

The Church and the World

The Roman Catholic Church in Britain wanted to claim a civic status, and its architecture contributed to this aim: its embrace of modernism demonstrated its willingness to participate in the modern nation. Yet new theological ideas began to change the Church’s conception of its purpose and its relationship to the world, and church architecture changed accordingly. The siting of churches had theological significance: the relationship between the church building and its environment reflected ideas about the nature of the Church, ideas that changed during these decades. The extent of agreement between clergy and town planners over church siting and design is often remarkable: if the Church aspired to a civic status, it accepted the ways in which that status was framed. But influences went both ways: planners accepted the Church’s changing views and allowed them expression in their cities.

In the 1950s, the parish church was considered a sacred edifice declaring its noble purpose as a shrine of worship and prayer and was often charged with expressing the fervour of the faithful. In the 1960s, this approach began to be attributed to a ‘fortress’ Church, intent on creating exclusionary bastions of faith to keep the faithful under surveillance, within its moral and social precincts.¹ These criticisms emerged from the new theology of the Church in the world pronounced at the Second Vatican Council. As early as 1952, Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar urged the ‘razing of the bastions’ and the ‘descent of the Church into contact with the world’ in a critique of conventional views that influenced the council’s thinking.² Theologians who invoked the image of the ‘fortress’ instead supported new models of a ‘pilgrim’ Church and a Church of ‘service’. Monumental churches began to be viewed with suspicion as the symbol of a Church under the delusion of triumph. It was argued that the Church should work more subtly within the world for its salvation, both through liturgy and through more material and social action. The Church had to be open to the world around it rather than confronting it, a view that also implied new attitudes to Christians of other denominations in a growing movement towards Christian unity, or ‘ecumenism’. These concepts found expression in new forms of church and new relationships between church and city.

10.1 St Anthony of Padua, Preston, by Giles Gilbert Scott, 1958–59. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2013

CHURCH AS SOCIAL MONUMENT

Whether traditional or modern in style, churches were often considered as monuments – distinguished urban landmarks, symbols of God’s transcendent presence and eternity and an expression of the strength of the Catholic community. The figure of the fortress was sometimes used positively to suggest the permanence of the Church through its architecture: St Anthony of Padua at Preston by Giles Gilbert Scott, sited on a major road into the city, was described by the bishop of Lancaster as ‘fitted to take its place among the other churches which stood like bastions around the Catholic town of Preston’ (Figure 10.1).³ Yet the design of the parish church was seen as a statement of the presence of the Catholic community within the wider civic body, a contribution to civic space rather than a rejection of it. Monumental churches suggest a desire to Catholicise and sacralise the city, consecrating modern civic endeavour. Town planners strengthened this attitude, encouraging the Church to design prominent landmark buildings.

Churches in new estates and older suburbs were carefully considered to maximise their prominence and visibility. In some cases, sites had been acquired in suburban developments before the war and new post-war churches replaced temporary buildings – at St Theresa, Sheffield, for example, where John Rochford’s modern Byzantine church was sited in a valley, overlooked by housing estates on the surrounding hills (Figure 10.2). New sites were acquired on major roads, central to the housing groups the parish served and often facing busy road junctions or roundabouts. Basilican churches presented their entrance gables to the most important street. Towers were built to make churches visible from a distance, often with illuminated crosses – at Reynolds and Scott’s church of St Bernard at Burnage in Manchester, for example, incongruous neon lighting meant its gable cross ‘can be seen for some considerable distance’.⁴ At Wythenshawe in Manchester in the late 1950s, the diocese of Shrewsbury obtained a central site in a post-war extension of this large suburban estate, and commissioned Adrian Gilbert Scott for a substantial statement church dedicated to St Anthony. The bishop, John Murphy, insisted that Scott plan the building ‘to dominate the approach from Rudpark Road’ and suggested placing the tower on its axis.⁵ The building presented its flanking silhouette to this approach so that its west front faced the neighbourhood centre and another junction on the Portway, a major road through the estate (Figure 10.3). Architects and clergy hoped their churches would dominate the urban landscape, representing the Church’s centrality in the lives of citizens.

10.2 St Theresa, Sheffield, by John Rochford, 1959–60. External sculpture by Philip Lindsey Clark. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009

10.3 St Anthony, Wythenshawe, by Adrian Gilbert Scott, 1957–60. The Portway runs alongside the church; its junction with Rudpark Road is at the centre of the photograph. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2013

10.4 Our Lady of the Assumption, Langley, near Manchester, by W. & J. B. Ellis, 1956–61. Initial design proposal of 1956. Courtesy of Ellis Williams Architects. Source: parish archive

These conventional patterns of siting were maintained in post-war suburban estates, where the urban poor were decanted to garden-city-style housing. Our Lady of the Assumption in Langley, north of Manchester, was typical. Langley was a post-war estate created with new powers granted to city authorities for ‘town expansion’.⁶ Through its centre ran Wood Street, along which several institutional buildings were planned, including an Anglican parish church, a substantial Catholic school and a neighbourhood shopping centre, while a municipal library and other facilities terminated the road. The provision of such amenities was intended to prevent the estate from becoming a dormitory suburb, helping a permanent community to develop: as Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government, put it, new residents ‘are expected to settle and make a new life, with their industries and employment, their social activities, their churches, their chapels and clubs in the areas to which they are asked to move’.⁷ Local authorities planning such estates therefore looked favourably on the clergy’s desire to build for their new parishes, allowing churches to become important features.

10.5 Our Lady of the Assumption, Langley, near Manchester, by W. & J. B. Ellis, 1956–61. In the final design the church’s orientation was rotated by 90°, and its tower moved to the road junction; also visible here are a convent on the left and the presbytery on the right. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2013

At Langley the Catholic parish acquired a site at a junction on Wood Street at the centre of the estate and at its highest point. W. & J. B. Ellis were selected as architects, and their initial design of 1956 showed a modern church presenting its flank to Wood Street (Figure 10.4). The diocese of Salford insisted on a revision to enhance the church’s presence by turning the gable to this main road, and a revised design followed accordingly; eventually, the new orientation was kept but the style changed to Romanesque (Figure 10.5).⁸ The architects proudly explained that their church would ‘dominate the new estate’, where it was to ‘stand on the crest of the hill on the main approach road from the old town centre … and will be clearly visible from all parts of the estate’, an aim enhanced by its lofty campanile.⁹

Of the 22,000 new residents of Langley in around 1960 a third were Catholic. Within 10 years, parish priest John Murphy, with help from Bishop Beck of Salford, arranged for five new schools and two convents of nuns providing household assistance to parents and the aged, besides the church itself costing £100,000 and seating 800.¹⁰ New estates such as Langley had unusually high proportions of young families, who took priority in city re-housing programmes. Church attendance was comparatively high, perhaps partly because Catholic schools required attendance for admission, but also because new residents sought social contacts before other neighbourhood networks had become established. Church buildings therefore seemed urgent for pragmatic as well as symbolic reasons. As in many other places, the parish church was one aspect of a campaign of provision for Catholic settlers – migrants, in a way, however short the distance – helping them adapt to their new situation. The Byzantine-Romanesque style of Ellis’s church with its vivid internal mosaics, especially typical of Lancashire, made a reassuring impression for Catholics uprooted from the city and resettled in unfamiliar surroundings, converting the space of modern planning into a place of significance and identity.¹¹

While Langley benefited from a range of municipal facilities, other places were less fortunate, and churches provided a civic life where the city had failed. At the pre-war estate of Southmead in Bristol, the central open space of a new housing estate became a religious centre: four churches were constructed around a green immediately behind the shopping area. Bristol’s pre-war housing had been sharply criticised by local sociologist Rosamond Jevons, who reported that suburban estates lacked adequate facilities and attributed widespread anti-social behaviour to ‘the absence of a social cement’.¹² A decade later, Southmead still lacked any municipal facilities, but the principal Christian denominations had established themselves in temporary buildings around the estate, and their provision of halls and rooms and their organisation of social life compensated for this complete absence of provision by the city.¹³

One of Jevons’s criticisms of Bristol’s housing was that the central areas were fragmented, and their greens had no purpose: ‘some centres have sacrificed the sense of unity through their excessive area of unusable open space’, she wrote, ‘and by the scattering of public buildings too uniformly around their fringes. The scale is too large for the size of buildings.’¹⁴ If the corporation (as the city council was called) could rarely provide substantial public buildings, it evidently realised that the churches would do so and accorded them prominent sites. The Catholic church of St Vincent de Paul designed by Kenneth Nealon was the first permanent church at Southmead, its site on the highest corner of the green obtained from the corporation, and the other denominations followed, one on each corner. Churches provided estates with the image of a township and of a coherent community that was otherwise lacking: as the Anglican priest of St Stephen phrased it, the churches could ‘build up our “Southmead consciousness”’.¹⁵

In another estate, churches were, unusually, planned from the outset. Richard O’Mahony’s church of St Michael and All Angels at Woodchurch outside Birkenhead benefited from its extraordinary siting and responded to it meaningfully. Woodchurch was planned as a ‘garden city’ housing 10,000 and including two new churches, and Herbert Rowse of Liverpool was appointed architect-planner in 1947.¹⁶ Rowse’s scheme was Beaux-Arts in plan, three broad green boulevards radiating down the hill from the existing medieval Anglican church. Community facilities lined the central avenue and the two new churches were sited on a secondary boulevard.¹⁷ In contrast to pre-war estates, Woodchurch was designed with a social infrastructure: ‘The Woodchurch Estate’, wrote Rowse, ‘is … the architectural setting of a fully developed sociological conception of a community of people living within a defined neighbourhood, having a conscious identity of its own and equipped for the maximum possibilities of the full social intercourse of such a community’.¹⁸ Rowse’s arguments reflected developments in modernist urbanism, the need for a ‘heart of the city’ being an important aspect of the thinking of CIAM after the war. The realisation of residents’ needs for social life prompted the integration into the urban plan of institutional buildings, which included churches.

10.6 St Michael and All Angels, Woodchurch, Birkenhead, by F. X. Velarde Partnership, 1962–65. Photographer unknown, c.1965. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

By 1960, the Roman Catholic parish of St Michael and All Angels was given a broad site at the end of this boulevard of housing, facing along its axis to the Anglican church a mile away at the top of the hill (Plan 7b). O’Mahony inherited the church commission from Velarde, who had already built the presbytery and planned a church off-centre. O’Mahony instead placed the church as close as possible to the axis so that the church terminated the street. Since the medieval church formed the focal point of the estate and the Catholic church took a marginal and opposite position, this urban setting presented an image of the structure of the nation, overseen by the established Church, within which Catholics hoped to take an important part. Lance Wright commented on the Catholic church’s siting with wry bemusement, noting that, despite the emerging ecumenical movement, the planners had imposed ‘a formidable display of disunity’ amongst the faithful: on Sunday mornings Anglicans walked up the hill to church and Catholics walked past them on the way down.¹⁹

10.7 St Michael and All Angels, Woodchurch, Birkenhead, by F. X. Velarde Partnership, 1962–65. Sculpture of the Virgin and Child by Norman Dilworth. By permission of Norman Dilworth. Photographer unknown, c.1965. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

While the estate was Beaux-Arts in plan, its housing had an Arts and Crafts appearance with pitched-roofed cottage-style terraces. The housing was meant to give the estate ‘the general character of a contemporary version of the traditional English village scene’, invoked also by the huddling of housing around the medieval church and the linear versions of village greens onto which the avenues’ houses faced.²⁰ O’Mahony’s church design reflected the domestic roofs of its neighbours, with a modern twist: their angles were continued in its hipped construction; their gables found a resonance in the lantern that completed the church’s aluminium-covered pyramid; and a chimney was implied with a blue-brick pillar that housed the sculpture of the Virgin (Figure 10.6). The church was conspicuous, an unmistakeably religious building type within its housing context, suggesting a conventional understanding of the transcendence of the Church in the world. Yet it was also modest, raising the domestic to a higher plane.²¹ The shape of the roof was carried through to the interior, its pine-boarded underside a symbol of shelter unifying the family of worshippers (Figure 10.7). In echoing and transforming the architecture of the house, it suggested the origins of the church in the early Christian house-church commonly evoked by the liturgical movement. O’Mahony’s church at Woodchurch marked a beginning of transition in Roman Catholic church design away from a monumental approach.

PERMANENCE AND MODERNISM: NEW TOWN CHURCHES

In the post-war New Towns monumental churches were actively encouraged by planners. Modern architecture was also preferred, and was accepted by clergy as appropriate to the setting: a monumental modernism therefore followed. New Towns had a larger scale and sense of political importance than suburban estates, and planners, architects and clergy all hoped that churches could contribute to the creation of a civic identity and community.

Glenrothes illustrates how clergy and planners negotiated the incorporation of churches into the New Towns. As in most other New Towns, its first master plans of 1949 by architect-planner Peter Tinto contained no church sites at all. When the Church of Scotland requested a site, it was told to collaborate with other denominations through an ‘Inter-Churches Committee’.²² These committees existed throughout Britain after the war: originally tasked with co-ordinating joint applications for building licences, they soon found another purpose in apportioning sites in new developments, and when licensing ended in 1954 this became their primary function. At Glenrothes the inter-churches committee presented the development corporation with a demand for 12 church sites in total, one of which was for Catholics.²³ The 1952 outline plan was then marked up with sites for churches (Figure 10.8). Most proposed locations were at prominent points on main roads, several at roundabouts; some were in the town centre, others in neighbourhood units, a few at the edges of the town as potential landmarks on approach. The Catholic parish was initially offered a prominent site at a corner of the town centre facing a traffic intersection.²⁴ The diocese was advised to accept it quickly, as it would be in high demand: ‘You have been able to get in on a first rate site in the very heart of the Town’, wrote their solicitor.²⁵ Later, however, the archbishop requested a different location, further east and conspicuous within a neighbourhood, placing the Catholic church more centrally in relation to its parishioners, as Glenrothes developed first towards the east.²⁶ These negotiations between the development corporation and the denominations show a pragmatic rather than principled approach to planning churches, but planners and churches all agreed in wanting landmark sites for both social and visual reasons.

When the archdiocese acquired the site, it came with a condition normally applied by New Town development corporations to private buildings, that a permanent building had to be completed within a fixed time limit. In most cases of New Town churches, this condition made it impossible to build up a site and a parish in stages in the normal way. Glenrothes refused the Catholic diocese’s request to build a temporary church, while Archbishop Gray thought that to build a permanent church immediately ‘would put an intolerable burden upon the small congregation’.²⁷ The diocese’s request for the alternative neighbourhood site undoubtedly reduced the corporation’s expectation of a substantial building, and allowed Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s modest church of St Paul to be completed within the required timeframe. Planners exerted pressure on churches to build quickly and ambitiously, hoping to show rapid progress in building the New Towns, avoiding the criticisms that had been made of suburban estates.

10.8 Glenrothes New Town Outline Plan, by the Glenrothes New Town Development Corporation Architects’ Office under Peter Tinto, 1952, showing sites for churches. By permission of Fife Council Archive Centre, Glenrothes

Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were probably chosen as architects at Glenrothes because of the New Town location. Reginald Fairlie had originally been commissioned for sketch designs for the central site, but was soon dismissed. The archdiocese briefly considered holding a competition for a new church design, to be judged by the development corporation. They appointed Coia, however, perhaps because he was already involved with St Bride’s at East Kilbride.²⁸ Metzstein and MacMillan explained how they had considered their design for Glenrothes in relation to its context: ‘The design of the buildings is intended not only to embody the relatively modest accommodation in striking form, but also to express the adventurous spirit of the New Town’, they wrote: the tower, lighting the altar below, would serve as a ‘landmark’.²⁹ When the architects exhibited a model in the town, parish priest Pierce Grace wrote excitedly to Coia that ‘the impression made was extremely good. One heard such expressions as: exciting, fascinating, unique etc. The Corporation officials were unreserved in their commendation. Taylor the County Planning Officer expressed his “great pleasure” that it was on show’.³⁰ The clergy were anxious that the church should be seen as a building worthy of its modern context. Their sensitivity to non-Catholic opinion suggests that they wanted their church to represent the New Town’s Catholic community to others, showing that it was an active and contributing part of the new society that the New Town enterprise sought to create.

10.9 St Bride, East Kilbride, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1957–64. Photo: G. Forrest Wilson, c.1964. Source: Glasgow School of Art

In richer and more optimistic dioceses and more confident New Towns, such pressure from planners for early permanent churches was more eagerly accepted by the clergy. At both East Kilbride and Harlow, the Catholic Church undertook substantial modern buildings in harmony with New Town design principles as contributions to their civic environment. At East Kilbride, parish priest John Battel urged the diocese of Motherwell to build a ‘commodious and attractive building, something of the dignity and character of a Catholic Town Centre, standing at a focal point’.³¹ As early as 1952, Battel agreed a central site for the future permanent church, and a site for a second parish church in the Westwood neighbourhood.³² The central site offered by the development corporation was prominently located on top of a hill that was to be left as a park, next to a Catholic school already being built, overlooking the main road from Glasgow (Plan 7a). Francis Scott, architect-planner for East Kilbride, praised the site’s ‘dominating character’ and copious open spaces, and Coia advised the diocese that it was ‘admirably placed for a church’.³³ Metzstein and MacMillan’s design linked church and presbytery across a courtyard to enhance the scale of the building, and the church’s sheer brick bulk and modern tower dominated the approach road from the hilltop (Figure 10.9). At its opening in 1964, it was revealed that from the beginning the bishop of Motherwell, James Scanlan, by then Archbishop of Glasgow, ‘had set his heart on “the provision of a church of the architectural distinction appropriate to this great venture in town-planning”’.³⁴

10.10 Anglican church of St Paul, Harlow New Town, by Humphrys & Hurst, 1957–59. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010

The site for the second Catholic church at East Kilbride, Our Lady of Lourdes, was also provided by the development corporation and was similarly positioned on an embankment overlooking another main road. This time the development corporation offered to build the church themselves, its chairman, Sir Patrick Dollan, a Catholic and former Provost of Glasgow, noting that ‘the site is an excellent one and worthy of the best buildings we can design and construct’.³⁵ The church was designed by Robert Reid of the development corporation architects’ office and opened in the same year as St Bride.³⁶ Not only was the form of its site similar to that of St Bride, but so was its design, a modern brick and reinforced-concrete rectangular building, its gable and detached tower overlooking the road, though its detailing owed more to Coventry Cathedral than to Metzstein and MacMillan’s brutalism. At East Kilbride, planners, clergy and architects collaborated in producing a modern monumental form of church.

The urban situation of Our Lady of Fatima at Harlow New Town was no less important than its liturgical innovations. At Harlow, architect-planner Frederick Gibberd had already proposed a church as a feature of the town’s civic centre, and the site was granted to the Church of England for their church of St Paul, a modern building designed by Derrick Humphrys (Figure 10.10). Through the Essex Churches Reconstruction Committee, the equivalent of the inter-churches committee at Glenrothes, the Catholic diocese of Brentwood requested three church sites.³⁷ Bishop Beck wanted their churches to be close to the Catholic schools, whose siting had been agreed in the early stages of the master plan.³⁸ The first church site was therefore agreed alongside a school on a main road, close to a roundabout between the town centre and Mark Hall North, one of the earliest neighbourhoods. Clergy and planners both gave careful thought to the treatment of this site.

Initially the Catholic site, which was also to contain a convent and church hall, did not extend to the road junction, but consisted only of a strip along First Avenue. At a meeting between Beck, parish priest Francis Burgess, their architect R. A. Boxall and the development corporation, it was agreed that ‘both the Roman Catholics and the Corporation were anxious to secure first-class usage and architectural relationship between the buildings and an impressive frontage to First Avenue’.³⁹ Clergy and planners agreed to extend the site around the corner onto Howard Way. Eric Adams, General Manager of Harlow Development Corporation, thought ‘that by rounding the corner the appearance of their scheme as a whole might benefit from a sense of greater compactness and more effective use of the corner’.⁴⁰ The planners expected the Catholic church to provide a monumental landmark facing onto the roundabout, and the clergy and their architects agreed, proposing to place the church in this position and promising completion within five years (Figures 10.11, 10.12).

In contrast to the parish of Our Lady of Fatima, a priest in the south of the town who wanted to build a modest temporary church a few years later was snubbed: ‘From a planning point of view we would not wish to see a building of this character in the New Town’, the planners complained, noting that their policy was ‘to encourage ecclesiastical bodies to put up permanent buildings from the outset’, even though all denominations found this difficult.⁴¹ Eventually a permanent church of the Holy Cross was opened in the south of the town, and a further church, St Thomas More, was built by Burles, Newton & Partners in a prominent location in the Little Parndon neighbourhood a few years later. New Town planners prevented the construction of temporary buildings for aesthetic reasons, demanding ambitious permanent churches in return for their allocation of prominent sites.

The selection of Gerard Goalen as architect for Our Lady of Fatima was also related to the New Town context. Goalen was a senior architect for the Harlow New Town Development Corporation under Gibberd designing factories for the town’s industrial estate. His final-year thesis project at the University of Liverpool had been a modern pilgrimage church, inspired by Auguste Perret’s church at Le Raincy, a design he showed to Burgess.⁴² Goalen was also recommended to Burgess by Gibberd:

He would design a building which would look well and would fit into the overall scheme. I have been a bit worried about the general treatment of your site, in that there is a danger that as different architects have been working on it, it will not hold together as a total design. … Here again Mr. Goalen might be very valuable to you.⁴³

10.11 Our Lady of Fatima, Harlow New Town, by Gerard Goalen, 1954–60. Photo: Ray Stebbings, c.1960. Source: reproduced by courtesy of Essex Record Office, Chelmsford

10.12 Our Lady of Fatima, Harlow New Town, by Gerard Goalen, 1954–60. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010

Others in the development corporation concurred, and their approbation was an important factor in the parish’s choice of architect: the likelihood that he would build a church in keeping with Harlow’s design ethos appealed to planners and clergy alike.⁴⁴

Goalen’s church was similar to the T-shaped concrete-framed Anglican church of St Paul, though his tall spire and dalle de verre windows tempered the building’s modernism with historical reminiscences. Goalen wrote in favour of monumental churches: ‘A church is the house of God. It should be as fine a building as we can afford, and … its scale should be generous.’⁴⁵ The development corporation, the parish priest and even, as the diocese discovered when it questioned the cost, the parishioners, all shared in this opinion.⁴⁶ The building’s plan, liturgically innovative as it was, followed logically from the church’s urban situation. The T-shaped nave with identical arms and entrance gables was appropriate to the corner site, the church facing each direction from which it would be viewed and approached. The liturgical movement’s egalitarian principle of the gathered congregation was also politically allied to the egalitarian ideals of the New Town. Goalen’s church embraced the spirit of the New Town, providing the Catholic community with a space that connected their modern social and physical environment with their religious lives.

Some of these buildings might well seem to justify the notion of the inward-looking fortress Church, monumentality and permanence implying isolation from the transitory secular world. St Bride at East Kilbride, lacking any windows and entered from a courtyard, detached from the world around it, could be seen to fit this image. Yet these and many other churches also suggest otherwise. Their prominent siting shows a desire to contribute to each town’s identity, participating in the post-war programme of resettlement and the establishment of new communities. Planners, meanwhile, wanted landmark churches to present their towns as balanced and settled places. Catholics adopted modern architecture to show their participation in the modern venture of the New Town: as their worshippers came to reside in modern houses, to shop in modern shopping centres graced with modern art, to work in newly built factories and study in bright modern schools, so they were to worship in churches that expressed the universal faith in the character of the modern town.

CHURCH AS MODERN URBAN LANDMARK: CITY CENTRES

Inner-city areas were also radically transformed by planners, often demanding urgent consideration from the clergy. Here, too, the Church accepted and engaged with the emerging modern city in the architecture of its churches. A comparison between church projects in Birmingham and Edinburgh, however, shows how this ambition began to be questioned. Like many other British cities, Birmingham’s centre was broadly redesigned after the war in response to modern ideas in urbanism, including the zoning of urban functions, high-rise housing and new forms of traffic management. Birmingham’s City Engineer, Herbert Manzoni, and, from 1952, City Architect Alwyn Sheppard Fidler, undertook major new road schemes and a massive programme of slum clearances and tower blocks. One of these projects was a ring-road encircling the city centre, originally mooted in the 1930s, planned in 1943, and begun in the late 1950s.⁴⁷ Its first section went straight through Dunn and Hansom’s substantial late-Victorian Roman Catholic church of St Catherine of Siena at Horsefair. The city set aside a new site for a replacement church in a key position on the outer edge of the ring road, looking across it towards a future shopping centre.

Parish priest Robert Nicholson considered appointing Bower Norris as architect, but a committee of his parishioners changed his mind: ‘it was pointed out that this was a grand opportunity for an enthusiastic and able young architect to make a name for himself’, he told Archbishop Grimshaw. ‘He couldn’t have a greater incentive than an important church on a conspicuous site in the centre of the city.’⁴⁸ The modernity of the new setting suggested the need for a young modern architect: ‘Since the whole area is going to be completely rebuilt over the next few years and our site will be a very prominent one, it would be unwise to wholly ignore the Contemporary environment’, wrote Nicholson. Moreover Fidler had declared himself ‘very interested in the building we are going to put up’, conveying to Nicholson a sense of responsibility towards the modern city.⁴⁹ Nicholson then appointed church architects for the diocese Harrison & Cox, who gave the job to a young assistant, Bernard James.⁵⁰ James’s circular plan may have been inspired by the liturgical movement, but it was also a response to the isolated and prominent site on the ring-road (Figure 10.13). Its simple volumes read well at speed and from a distance; its tower was an instantly comprehensible sign; its circular plan addressed views from around the road junction. St Catherine was substantial in scale and cost partly because of the city’s expropriation grant, but also because Birmingham’s policy of inner-city high-rise housing meant that this remained one of the diocese’s most populous parishes, over 2,500 Catholics attending every Sunday in the mid-1960s.⁵¹

A similar scheme was proposed for the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Mary in Edinburgh, but its abandonment marked a change of approach. The cathedral occupied an early Gothic-revival church by James Gillespie Graham, opened in 1814, originally hemmed in amidst Victorian tenements. In 1963, it found itself at the centre of a newly declared Comprehensive Development Area: Edinburgh Corporation planned to demolish swathes of tenements and build new housing; a developer would build a commercial megastructure on the hill behind the cathedral; and the cathedral would face a junction on a newly planned motorway ring-road.⁵²