St George's Church

St George's Church is the Roman Catholic church of Polegate, a town in the Wealden district of East Sussex, and part of the parish of Hailsham and Polegate in the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton. Opened at the end of 1938, the simple but "very dignified" flint and stone Gothic Revival building stands on the south-east corner of the Polegate crossroads, where the High Street meets the main road to Eastbourne, and its story is one of patient persistence: more than forty years passed between the first thought of "bringing the Mass to Polegate" and the laying of its foundation stone.

Polegate itself was a creation of the railway. Originally a small village in the parish of Hailsham, it grew rapidly after the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened two routes that met at a junction there: a settlement of only fifty houses in 1873 grew to a town of more than 8,000 people by the early twenty-first century, its suburbs running into those of its larger southern neighbour, Eastbourne. For Catholics, Polegate lay within the vast parish of Our Lady of Ransom in Eastbourne town centre, five miles away. In October 1895 the priest of that church told the Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Southwark that there was demand for Mass in various distant towns and villages — in Polegate, he reported, there were nine Catholics who would be better served locally. That same year William Attwood of Osborne House died; his house had a private oratory which may have hosted public Masses, though no definitive record survives. Nothing more happened until 1913, when another man allowed his house in the Hampden Park area, close to Polegate, to be used for worship, an arrangement formalised into a monthly Mass from May 1919.

The decisive figure was Father John Corballis, who became parish priest of Our Lady of Ransom in January 1936 and immediately "set his mind on building a church at Polegate". The very next month he paid £1,318.10s.10d. for the plot at the crossroads, clearing the debt through regular fundraising at Eastbourne. An architect was commissioned, building was planned for the summer of 1938, and on 7 June 1938 Bishop William Francis Brown, Auxiliary Bishop of Southwark and Titular Bishop of Pella, laid the foundation stone. Construction took exactly six months: on 7 December 1938 Bishop Peter Amigo and several Eastbourne priests attended the first Mass in the church, dedicated to Saint George. The building cost £4,000 with a further £500 for fittings, leaving £3,000 outstanding.

The church was built by W. Llewellyn & Sons to designs by J. O'Hanlon Hughes and Geoffrey Webb — the same partnership that had worked in 1935 at St Thomas More Church in nearby Seaford; the 1938 Catholic Calendar and Blotter described Hughes as architect and Webb as "technical advisor". Webb's other Sussex work includes a stained glass window at Roedean School and a sculpture and village sign at Mayfield. Their Polegate church is a simple Perpendicular Gothic Revival building: a long rectangle without transepts or side chapels, under a single-span gabled roof, with a side porch that "projects oddly beyond the west wall" of the nave. The walls are local flint dressed with Portland stone; groups of four slightly arched windows sit in plain rectangular surrounds along the north and south walls, with taller four-light windows of slightly more complex tracery at east and west. The effect has been summarised as "Gothic, but only just", and the interior is equally unadorned beneath its canted ceiling. Fr Corballis, at the opening, put it best: "not exotic", but "in harmony with the surrounding downland" and "plain ... [but] very dignified".

The young church was soon tested. At first there was one Mass on Saturday evening and one on Sunday morning — the pattern throughout its years as a chapel of ease — and Stations of the Cross were installed in March 1939. The Second World War brought a flood of evacuees, mostly children, to the Eastbourne area, and St George's was described as "full" each week; later in the war, as evacuees left and bombing made the coast unsafe, services across the parish were cut back and some churches closed temporarily, but St George's stayed open. Peace brought structural troubles. By 1952 the church was found to have been subsiding "for some time", and when Canon John Curtin took charge of the Eastbourne parish in 1956 the altar had to be destroyed for dry rot and most of the seats for woodworm; the church was unheated, its walls and floor "of rough uncovered cement", and the waterlogged site had left the building damp. Our Lady of Ransom paid for improvements, and more extensive work followed in 1965 at a cost of £20,000.

Few churches can have changed parish as often. Canon Curtin resolved to give independence to several of Eastbourne's chapels of ease, noting that this was "in accordance with their express desire over many years". In July 1958 Father John Flanagan was appointed first parish priest of Polegate with Hampden Park, initially still a district within Eastbourne parish; full separation came in June 1960, when St Joachim's Church opened at Hampden Park — its people having worshipped meanwhile at St Gregory's in Eastbourne's Old Town, at St George's, in a public hall and in a derelict house on the future church's site — and the parish of Polegate with Hampden Park was formally created. In September 1965 Hampden Park was given its own parish, leaving Fr Flanagan solely in charge of Polegate; the two recombined in 1999; and reorganisation in the early twenty-first century separated them again and created the present joint parish of Hailsham and Polegate. By 2005 St George's was served by priests from St Wilfrid's Church in Hailsham, as it still is.

The church is licensed for worship under the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855, with registration number 58747, and was registered for marriages on 26 February 1940. A diocesan analysis of 2005–06 recorded one Sunday Mass with an average attendance of eighty-eight worshippers against a seating capacity of about a hundred (the 1938 opening report claimed 120). As of 2019 the parish priest celebrates Mass at St George's at 9.00 am on Sundays, with the Sacrament of Penance monthly. One of four places of worship in Polegate, alongside Anglican, United Reformed and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and one of eight churches in the Deanery of Eastbourne, St George's remains what Fr Corballis built at the crossroads: a plain, dignified downland church that took forty years to arrive and has served its town ever since.