St Boniface Church

St Boniface's Church in St Budeaux, Plymouth, is a Church of England parish church with an unusual modern history: the original Edwardian church by the distinguished architect William Douglas Caröe was demolished in 2003, replaced by a new combined church and hall built earlier the same year — making St Boniface one of the rare parishes to have voluntarily traded a grand but unaffordable building for a practical new one, and to have carried its treasures across.

The story begins with the explosive growth of Edwardian Plymouth. St Boniface's was conceived as a chapel of ease to the parish church of St Budeaux, where an estimated four thousand people lived a mile or two from a parish church that could seat only about three hundred. A movement for a new church formed around 1897 under the Three Towns Church Extension Scheme for Plymouth and Devonport; a congregation met in a hired room from about 1899 and from 1900 in the new Masonic Hall, which also proved too small. In 1900 a plot near Victoria Road railway station was given by the Rev Dr Trelawny-Ross, Miss Hare and Miss Trelawny Collins, for both church and hall, on condition that the patronage of the new district be vested in the Diocese of Exeter.

The mission hall came first: built and furnished for about £800 by Allen and Tozer of St Budeaux, seating 340 with its own small temporary chancel, its foundation stone laid on 17 December 1900 by Lady Jackson, wife of the great contractor Sir John Jackson. It opened for divine service on 31 March 1901 and was dedicated by Bishop Herbert Edward Ryle of Exeter that June, serving as the temporary church while funds were raised — and afterwards as the parish hall with Sunday schoolroom and recreation room.

Caröe's church followed a decade later: a design seating 606, with a four-bay nave, north and south aisles, chancel, chapel, choir vestry with organ chamber above, clergy vestry, north porch and a west tower, with a classroom in the basement. Built by G. B. Turpin of Plymouth, its foundation stone was laid by Bishop Archibald Robertson on 4 October 1911 and the church consecrated by him on 14 May 1913 — but money ran short, and the west tower and one bay of the nave were left unbuilt behind a temporary wall. In 1916 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners formed the district chapelry of St Boniface, Devonport, from within St Budeaux parish. The west end waited half a century: a Church Extension Committee formed in 1960 raised funds for completion, and a concrete extension by the Plymouth architects Evans & Sloggett was finished in 1965 — though the intended tower, with its peal of bells, was never realised. The critic Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was unkind about the result, describing the church as "an abundance of ugly and eccentric outlines".

By the twenty-first century the building was deemed unsustainable — "too expensive to maintain, keep up and repair" — and the parish made its bold choice. Planning permission granted in 2001 allowed the demolition of the 1901 hall and the erection on its site of a new combined church and church hall, designed by Maguire & Co of Thame and built in 2003. Under the planning conditions the original church had to be demolished before the new one could open; the Church Commissioners sold it to the Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society, which demolished it in 2003. The site stood empty for years until, after a 2014 permission, eleven houses were built upon it.

The new church carried the old one's light with it: the stained glass windows of about 1965 by Dom Charles Norris — the Buckfast Abbey monk and master of dalle de verre glass — were salvaged from Caröe's building and installed in the new church. In the grounds stands a teak cross made from ship timber, presented to the church by the Royal Navy in 1965 — a fitting emblem for a Plymouth parish. St Boniface's remains an active place of worship: smaller than Caröe dreamed, but solvent, serviceable and very much alive.