Wymondham is a busy, pretty town, near enough to Norwich to inherit some of its metropolitan airs and graces, but remote enough to have a sense of independence. The two main churches, bless them, are both open daily. The town of Wymondham is most famous for its Abbey of course, which is to say the former Abbey church which is now the Anglican parish church. Its twin towers are visible for miles, although the low site on the outskirts of the town centre means that you could wander around the shopping streets without knowing it was there. Curiously, the Abbey church is dedicated to St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury and, with the modification of the first Saint into 'Our Lady', so is the Catholic parish church. I can't think of another occasion in East Anglia where the Anglican and Catholic parish churches of a town share a dedication. It is as if two rival football teams played in the same colours.

Wymondham Catholic church sits where the road to Norwich leaves the town centre. It replaced an earlier building at Town Green. The town had been on the circuit of centres visited by the 'motor chapel', a travelling mission from St John the Baptist in Norwich, now the Cathedral. A strong need for a permanent presence was recognised, and this first church was donated on land belonging to a Mr Glasspool. A Great Gothic Fane, published to commemorate the opening of St John the Baptist, pictured the church (left, above) and noted that Mass was said there for the first time on the second Sunday after Epiphany 1912, the Feast of the Holy Name, by one Father Hughes. The congregation numbered about forty, of whom only a quarter were Catholics. It seems that the Town Green church was always considered a temporary home, and the next chapter in the story of Wymondham's Catholic church began after the Second World War. Father Malcolm Cowin arrived after spending three and a half years in a Japanese Prisoner of War slave labour camp. During his suffering he had vowed that, if he survived, he would build a memorial to those who had not. The parish had obtained a large parcel of land just before the War, and Father Cowin used it to erect a memorial church.

The church is a building of two halves. The westerly 1952 part (the building is liturgically back to front) is a fairly standard post-war hall church, with tall windows and a tiled roof. And then in the 1990s one of the most dramatic extensions to a Catholic church in East Anglia was added, doubling the length of the building. The style of it is broadly Norfolk vernacular, yet in a post-modern asymmetrical style, as if a barn had built by a surrealist farmer. It is lit by windows in the eastern end and by a skylight. And perhaps there is a vaguely eastern feeling to it as well. The roof spreads beyond the side walls, projecting downwards dramatically to be tied in by a metal girder as if it was the edge of a tent. The entrance is a tall rectangle split in half by a projecting lintel. Beside the entrance, a plaque records that this church is a memorial to those who died in Japanese prisoner-of-war & internment camps during the World War 1939-1945.

You might think that the interior space would simply be a lengthening of the 1950s church, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is much braver and more exciting. The old and new structures are separated by a large glass curtain wall, enabling a view right through to the sanctuary from the main entrance, but dividing the internal space into two rooms of about equal size. The western room, the original church, continues to fulfil its former function. The eastern room is almost completely empty, apart from a cool, white font set right in the middle. This font predates the 1950s church, and so must have come from elsewhere. A quiet space, a space for contemplation, and intentionally so perhaps. You step through the glass wall into the original memorial church. The sanctuary ahead has a wall of martyr saints, and to the north side of the church is the memorial to FEPOWs, Far Eastern Prisoners of War. It is a national memorial, not just for Wymondham, and not just to Catholics.

The memorial consists of three large glass sheets which form a triptych, and they are engraved with words and simple designs, with border decorations of bamboo, evocative of the Far East. The words include a quotation from the Book of Job: For you will forget your misery, thinking of it only as a flood which passed long ago. Another is from the Book of Ecclesiastes: There is a season for everything, and a time for every purpose under Heaven: a time for war, a time for peace. The quiet light and ordinary windows of the rest of the church are reflected back to you as you stand there. A book in a glass case records the names of almost 25,000 British victims of the slave labour camps. An embroidered cover has an inscription that begins You died in misery, often in agony, upon no bed with nothing but a sack to cover you, in squalor unbelievable... Below are a set of what look like former altar rails, perhaps from the 1912 church, with an image of the Assumption and a swirling Arts and Crafts angel. Another book in a case on the wall remembers those who survived the camps but have died since, and today there cannot be many survivors left alive. Underneath it is a piece of the Burma railroad on which many of them worked and died. It is simple and moving. A special place.

Simon Knott, April 2023

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