Geograph - photograph every grid square

TQ3179 : The present St Alphege church TQ3179 : Gateway Training Centre, Lancaster Street

St Alphege, Southwark - present church and site of old church

One of five churches in and around London dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury martyred by Danes in 1012 - the remaining dedications are mostly in Kent.

The old church in Lancaster Street was completed in 1882 to the design of Robert Willey. Pevsner ignored it on his first perambulation of Southwark in 1952, but Bridget Cherry in a parenthesis to the 1983 revision of his guide (the year the church was declared redundant) records that it was in red brick, aisleless, in a "minimal Early English" style, and famous for its extreme Anglo-Catholicism. Father Blagdon-Gamlen's Church Traveller's Directory of 1973 tells us that it had a daily Mass, Sung Eucharist on Sundays, confessions and a reserved Sacrament - but that was by no means unusual for an inner-London church of the time. The church was finally demolished in 1991 and the Gateway Training Centre now occupies the site, the congregation having moved to the former hall.