Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Gillingham

This splendid red brick Catholic church sits on the edge of the Park of Gillingham Hall, the most southerly of three churches in a row with the Anglican parish church of St Mary beside it and the ruin of the medieval church of All Saints beyond that. The Kenyon family of the Hall had been received into the Catholic Church, and they paid for this building by Frederick Banham in 1898. It is hard not to be put in mind of the 19th Century village Catholic church built beside Broome Hall in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, although of course the Crouchbacks were not converts.

I've never found this church open. Banham was also responsible for the grander and more hospitable St Bene't Catholic church in nearby Beccles, to which this is a chapel of ease. Perhaps most memorable of all are the rows of cast iron grave markers, presumably the work of a local Catholic-owned foundry and recalling those in the convent cemetery a few miles off at Ditchingham.

Simon Knott, October 2021

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