Sacred Heart, North Walsham

North Walsham's thrilling little Catholic church sits between the town centre and the railway station. It was the 1935 work of Edward Bower Norris, a Manchester-based architect. Bizarrely, the Architects' Journal of the day referred to the church as being situated in the Norfolk Fens, despite it being a good fifty miles to the east of them. That the church was built at all is a testament to the faith and energy of a Catholic convert, Frank Loads, a local draper. North Walsham Catholics gathered to hear Mass in the upstairs room of his shop, a priest coming from Cromer once a month for this purpose. Loads and his wife made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1912, and while they were there they sought and received permission from Pope Pius X to establish a proper Catholic chapel in North Walsham. The energetic Loads set about creating a chapel in the attic of his garage, and in 1926 the Bishop of Northampton inducted North Walsham's first Catholic parish priest since the Reformation. Eventually funds were raised for the erection of the current church on land donated to the diocese by Loads.

The building that Bower norris designed is entirely in the Art Deco style of the day, most familiar from Bankside power station in London, now Tate Modern. The tower sits at the west end of the south aisle, but otherwise this is an unadorned building of straight lines and flat sufaces, and so it is perhaps without the sophistication of East Anglia's major Art Deco church of the 1930s, All Hallows in Ipswich. The excitement comes from the attention to detail and the consistency of the style on such a small scale. Everything is in proportion, and so the outside makes the church seem larger than it actually is inside. Exterior details include decorative leading in the glass of the windows, and impressive recessed doors to south and west.

The church you step into is open and full of light. A Galilee at the west end is screened from the nave by glass and cheerful Art Deco ironwork that would be quite at home in Hercules Poirot's apartment. There's a platform above for the church musicians and choir. The elegant font is set in a wooden chequerboard floor, and beyond it the benches face east towards a sanctuary with wrought iron railings painted a vivid purple. To the north of the sanctuary is a small chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, the patron saint of North Walsham's medieval church, and on the other side is a lady chapel. The icon in it was brought back from Rome in 1912 by Frank Loads and his wife when they got permission to build a church.

(I'm grateful to the Sacred Heart website for some of the information on this page.)

Simon Knott, November 2022

Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.