Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley

The Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony is a Roman Catholic church in Crawley, a town in West Sussex that grew in the twentieth century from a small market town into one of Britain's largest post-war New Towns. The town's first permanent place of Catholic worship was founded here in 1861, beside a Franciscan friary, and the present large brick church — a striking work of the 1950s by one of the most individual ecclesiastical architects of the day — stands in a commanding position facing the town centre, a Grade II listed building that tells the story of the return of Catholicism to a corner of Protestant Sussex and of Crawley's dramatic modern growth.

Crawley was an ancient place, founded as a market town in the early thirteenth century, with an Anglican parish church of St John the Baptist a century later and a parish boundary that ran, unusually, up the middle of its wide High Street. After the Reformation the area became firmly Protestant — Anglicanism predominated, Nonconformity took root, and Roman Catholicism was almost unknown; a survey of 1582 found just two recusants in the neighbouring parish of Ifield. For nearly three centuries Catholic worship was effectively absent from the district, as it was from much of rural England under the penal laws.

The Catholic revival came in the nineteenth century, and at Crawley it came through the generosity of a convert family and the zeal of a Franciscan order. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the old hostility to Catholicism softened and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 opened the way, a wealthy local family of converts to Catholicism invited friars of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin — the austere reforming branch of the Franciscans, with their distinctive pointed hoods — to settle in the area. In 1861 the friars established a friary at Crawley, and beside it founded the town's first permanent Catholic church, dedicated to St Francis, the founder of their order, and St Anthony of Padua, the great Franciscan preacher. From this small beginning the Catholic community of Crawley grew, served by the friars from their friary.

The transformation of Crawley in the twentieth century made a far larger church necessary. After the Second World War, Crawley was designated one of the new towns built to relieve London's housing crisis and to provide planned communities with homes, work and amenities; its population multiplied many times over, and the modest Victorian church could no longer serve the swelling Catholic congregation. In the late 1950s the friars commissioned a new church from Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, one of the most distinguished and idiosyncratic church architects of his generation, known for his inventive handling of brick and his deep knowledge of Gothic and Victorian architecture. Goodhart-Rendel designed a large and boldly modelled brick church, and the new building was consecrated and opened on 18 November 1959 — the hundredth anniversary, almost to the year, of the Capuchin friars' arrival in Crawley, a fitting way to mark a century of Catholic life in the town.

The friars' time in Crawley, however, was drawing to a close. In 1980 the Capuchins left the town and the friary closed; the friary buildings were subsequently demolished. But the great brick church survived, and it continues as the Roman Catholic parish church of central Crawley, now served by diocesan clergy rather than the friars who built it. English Heritage listed the building at Grade II in recognition of its architectural and historical importance — a significant example of mid-twentieth-century Catholic church architecture by a noted hand, and a monument to the religious history of the New Town.

The church's commanding position facing the town centre makes it a landmark of modern Crawley, a town that preserves, in its old High Street and its historic core, traces of the medieval market town from which it grew, surrounded by the planned neighbourhoods of the New Town. Gatwick Airport, on the edge of the borough, has made Crawley a major centre of the aviation industry, and the town has continued to grow and diversify, its Catholic community drawing, like the town as a whole, on people from many nations.

From the near-absence of Catholicism in Reformation Sussex, through the invitation of Capuchin friars by a convert family in 1861 and the foundation of the town's first Catholic church, to the explosive growth of the post-war New Town and Goodhart-Rendel's bold brick church of 1959, the Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony tells the story of the return and flourishing of the Catholic faith in Crawley. The friars who gave the church its name have gone, and their friary with them, but the church they built still stands in its commanding position above the town centre — a Grade II listed landmark, and the living Catholic parish church of one of England's great New Towns.