Dereham sits right in the middle of the county, the Heart of Norfolk, as it styles itself on the signs as you enter the town. Until forty years ago it was called East Dereham, but coinciding with its change in name it has grown substantially, until it is now Norfolk's largest country market town after Thetford. Of course, this isn't saying much as the population is still only a little under 20,000. The town has little of any architectural significance apart from its grand parish church of St Nicholas, a substantial cruciform building with a separate bell tower. In the days when it was built it was in the care of the Catholic Church, but they were dispossessed at the Reformation, and it wasn't until the early 20th Century that a Catholic church was built again in the town. Recusants during the penal years might have travelled to Costessey near Norwich where the Jerningham family celebrated Mass in their chapel or to Oxborough on the other side of Swaffham, where the Bedingfields did the same in the chapel of Oxburgh Hall.

When Catholicism was decriminalised in England in the early 19th Century, Norfolk was slow to repopulate itself with Catholic churches. This was partly because Catholicism was largely confined to the towns and to the estates of landed Catholic families, but also because the Catholic population of Norfolk was probably the smallest of any English county. Even today, Norwich is the least Catholic large city in England. At the start of the 20th Century the great church of St John the Baptist had been consecrated there, richly bankrolled by the wealthy Duke of Norfolk, and it was serving outlying stations in places like Wymondham and North Walsham. But it wasn't until 1912 that Catholic worship was re-established in Dereham, and then in 1951 the current church of Sacred Heart and St Margaret Mary became the new home of Dereham's Catholics. Like most of East Anglia's small town Catholic churches it is small and homely, and like nearly all of them it is no longer really big enough for its vibrant and diverse community, for in East Anglia the Catholic population has been rising year on year, thanks largely to immigration from Eastern Europe and south India.

The church you step into is a simple single-celled brick building with an apse. The sanctuary is elegant and simple, a white altar under a hanging crucifix. A small statue of St Withburga, the patron saint of Dereham, sits opposite the light wood font. The furnishings and blue carpeting are pleasant and welcoming, and the church is obviously much loved. I always find it a mark of the civilisation of a small town when the churches are open to visitors. And what does that tell us about the small number of towns that keep their churches locked, I wonder? But Sacred Heart is proudly open every day. About twenty years ago I was visiting here and got into conversation with the parish priest, and mentioned how pleased I was to find the church open to passing strangers and pilgrims. I explained that I was visiting churches in the area, and he shook his head sorrowfully. "I am afraid that you will find that some of the churches around here are locked", he mourned. "I simply cannot understand it. I think it is shocking - shocking - to lock people out of the House of God." And he was right of course, but he might have been pleased to learn that, twenty years on, many more of them are open.

Simon Knott, July 2023

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