Our Lady of the Annunciation Church

Our Lady of the Annunciation Church stands at the corner of London Road and North Everard Street in the centre of King's Lynn, Norfolk — a Roman Catholic parish church with a story that touches Augustus Pugin, a future king, and the revival of England's greatest medieval pilgrimage. For thirty-seven years it served as the national shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and it remains a pontifical shrine today, listed Grade II by Historic England in 2022.

The Catholic mission in King's Lynn began in 1802 with a French priest, Fr le Goff — one of the émigré clergy of the revolutionary era — succeeded by his countryman Fr Dacheux. A chapel followed in Coronation Square in 1822, and in 1839 six acres on London Road were bought for a proper church. The commissioning priest, Fr John Dalton, engaged no less a designer than Augustus Pugin, the genius of the Gothic Revival then at the height of his powers. The foundation stone was laid on 10 May 1844, and on 8 May 1845 the church was consecrated by Bishop William Wareing, Vicar Apostolic of the Eastern District and later first Bishop of Northampton. Pugin's church was modest — nave and chancel seating 200, built for £1,500, with a planned tower and spire never executed and a north aisle added later — and, as events proved, modestly built.

By the century's end the building was failing: its foundations were unsound and cracks were spreading. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The Prince of Wales — the future Edward VII — complained to the priest, Fr George Wrigglesworth, that Catholic guests staying at Sandringham House were being inconvenienced by the state of the church when they came for Mass, and personally paid the architect J. William Lunn to report on the fabric. Lunn, designer of Catholic churches at Southampton, Boscombe, Portsmouth and Chipping Campden, judged it beyond repair. He designed the replacement, salvaging Pugin's rood, font and stained glass for reuse. The foundation stone was laid on 29 September 1896; the new church, built by W. Hubbard of East Dereham for £3,000 — toward which the Prince of Wales contributed fifty guineas — was opened on 2 June 1897 by Arthur Riddell, Bishop of Northampton.

The new church carried a far larger ambition. In 1896 Charlotte Pearson Boyd had purchased and restored the medieval Slipper Chapel at Walsingham, the last surviving station of England's greatest Marian pilgrimage, destroyed at the Reformation. Fr Wrigglesworth, meanwhile, had visited Loreto in Italy and seen the Basilica della Santa Casa, the legendary Holy House of Nazareth. His new church at King's Lynn included a Lady Chapel built as a replica of the Holy House — and in 1897 Pope Leo XIII officially established it as the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, restoring the ancient devotion after three and a half centuries. The Pope blessed a statue of Mary, a replica of the venerated image in Santa Maria in Cosmedin carved at Oberammergau, which arrived by train on 19 August 1897 and was carried in procession from the station to the church. The next day, 20 August 1897, a group of forty to fifty pilgrims walked from the King's Lynn church to the Slipper Chapel — the first public pilgrimage to Walsingham since the Reformation, and the seed of the vast modern pilgrimage movement. The shrine altar, designed by Joseph Aloysius Pippet, was consecrated by Bishop Riddell on 15 May 1900. In 1934 the national shrine was transferred to the Slipper Chapel itself — now the Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham — and the King's Lynn shrine became a pontifical shrine, a dignity it retains.

Today Our Lady of the Annunciation shares its parish with Holy Family Church in King's Lynn, with Mass at the Annunciation church on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, while Holy Family also hosts Syro-Malabar liturgies — the Indian Catholic rite now part of Norfolk's church life. Pilgrims bound for Walsingham still pause at the replica Holy House where the modern pilgrimage began, in the church a Pugin started and a king helped rebuild.