Church of the Sacred Heart

The Church of the Sacred Heart is the Roman Catholic parish church of Fareham in Hampshire, opened in 1878 on a centrally located site to replace a converted shed that had served the town's Catholics since 1873. Its architect was John Crawley of London, whose other Catholic churches nearby include St John the Evangelist's in Portsmouth — now Portsmouth's Catholic cathedral — and St Joseph's at Havant; his Fareham church has been judged a "small and well-detailed essay" in flint and brick, in the Decorated Gothic Revival style.

The post-Reformation origins of Catholic worship around Fareham reach back to 1747, when descendants of Royalists loyal to James II, fleeing persecution in northern England, settled in the village of Soberton in the Meon valley north of the town. They bought a farmhouse and turned it into a chapel with a priest's house, served by Jesuit priests until 1839. After that, the nearest churches were at Havant — "one of five ancient centres of Catholicism in Hampshire" — and Gosport, where the first church had been built in 1750. Fareham itself gained a Catholic mission only in 1873, when James Bellord, then a military chaplain and later Vicar Apostolic of Gibraltar, acquired a shed on West Street and converted it into a small chapel where Mass was said weekly; it was registered for worship as the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on 7 February 1874, with another military chaplain, Father T. Foran, as first priest.

Land nearby — an old timber yard — was soon bought for a permanent church, though sources differ on whether the purchase came in 1874 or 1877. The foundation stone was laid on 19 March 1877, construction took just over a year, and the first Mass was celebrated on 4 September 1878, with Bishop James Danell of Southwark presiding as the church was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The building cost £2,400. It was registered for worship under the Places of Worship Registration Act on 13 June 1878 and for marriages on 10 February 1903.

Crawley is "not a major figure on the national scene", but his Catholic churches form a distinctive group: St Joseph's at Havant (1875) is very similar in style to Fareham, while the Church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Francis at West Grinstead in Sussex (1875–76) is larger and more elaborate. He was still working on Portsmouth's St John the Evangelist and the Church of the Sacred Heart at Hove when he died in 1881, both completed by Joseph Stanislaus Hansom. His Fareham church, originally seating 300, is a "small but proud design" of flint with brickwork, inspired by the earlier Catholic churches of Augustus Pugin. The tall nave is flanked by low red-brick aisles, with clerestory windows above in the shape of quatrefoils; other windows are paired lancets with Decorated tracery and trefoil heads, and beyond the nave a polygonal apse houses the sanctuary. At the west end is a narthex, joined by an entrance lobby of 1976–77 that links to the nineteenth-century church hall. Inside, arcades on octagonal and round piers mark off the aisles. The fittings include a Bath stone baptismal font; an altar reconfigured in the 1920s with decorative mosaic panelling of biblical scenes; a modern ambo; and a tabernacle that originally stood in the chapel of Lambeth Hospital in London. Most of the stained glass is by unidentified designers, but the south aisle has a window of about 1940 by J. Edward Nuttgens depicting Jesus walking on water. The red-brick presbytery was built in 1934 at the end of a nearby terrace, physically linked to the church; less happily, postwar alterations to the town-centre road network have left the building "unfortunately marooned" between major roads, and a fire in 1973 prompted internal changes including new pews.

The Sacred Heart has been a fertile mother church. Its priests said Mass in Portchester, east of Fareham, from 1935, and a permanent church dedicated to Our Lady of Walsingham was built there in 1954 — though it closed in 2010 and was approved for demolition in 2016. A Mass centre in a drill hall at Park Gate, west of Fareham, established by 1960, grew into the Church of St Margaret Mary in 1966, still in use as part of a separate parish. In Stubbington to the south, a Mass centre founded in 1976 likewise became a permanent church, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, now in a joint parish with Lee-on-the-Solent. Postwar growth within Fareham itself led to Mass being said from 1973 at St Columba's, a Church of England parish church, until a purpose-built Catholic church dedicated to St Philip Howard opened in the southern suburbs in 1980; it remains in use as part of the Sacred Heart parish.

Today the parish covers the whole of Fareham town, Portchester, and the villages of Knowle, Wickham, North Boarhunt and Southwick to the north. Two weekend Masses are offered at the Sacred Heart — a Vigil Mass on Saturday evening and a 9.00am Sunday Mass — with weekday Masses on certain days, two additional Sunday Masses at St Philip Howard, and Confession weekly on Saturdays: the flint-and-brick church from the age of Catholic revival still anchoring a parish that began in a West Street shed.