St John the Evangelist's Church, Burgess Hill

St John the Evangelist's Church is the Church of England parish church of Burgess Hill in West Sussex — the town's first Anglican church, consecrated in 1863, and a Grade II* listed building. A Gothic Revival church built of the local bricks that were themselves the town's founding industry, it has presided over Burgess Hill's growth from common land to commuter town, spinning off mission chapels and daughter churches as the streets spread, until today it is one of three Church of England parishes serving the town.

Burgess Hill scarcely existed before the Victorian age. Until the mid-nineteenth century the area was rural common land straddling the boundary of the parishes of Clayton and Keymer, and the settlement grew from two events: the implementation of the inclosure act for Keymer's part of St John's Common, passed on 18 April 1828, and the opening of the London and Brighton Railway Company's line from Haywards Heath to Brighton on 21 September 1841, with Burgess Hill station opening the same day. The railway stimulated residential development and let the Keymer Brick and Tile Works — already the town's main industry — expand its sales. When the inclosure of Clayton's part of the common was completed in 1857, the town's growth accelerated again.

The church's birth involved a very Victorian quarrel. From the early 1840s Anglican worship was held in the school in London Road, and as early as 1854 a local newspaper observed that the schoolroom, Keymer parish church and Clayton parish church together could not cope with the worshippers. The 1857 inclosure award reserved an acre and a half for a church, but the reserved plot turned out to lie too far from where the town centre had actually developed, and even when a landowner offered two acres of undeveloped town-centre land free of charge, agreement could not be reached. A group of Clayton landowners, furious at the proposal to move the church from the site fixed by the award, took out a newspaper advertisement in July 1861 protesting against any change. They lost: building began on the donated central site, to the designs of Thomas Talbot Bury, with a Chichester firm winning the contract. The Bishop of Chichester, Ashurst Turner Gilbert, laid the foundation stone on 4 November 1861, and the church was consecrated in June 1863. For its first two years it was a chapel of ease held jointly by Clayton and Keymer; in June 1865 it received its own parish, dedicated to John the Evangelist, with a capacity of about seven hundred — roughly half the pews subject to pew rents that paid the vicar's stipend.

Talbot Bury designed the church in a thirteenth-century Decorated Gothic style with Geometrical elements, in red brick laid in Flemish bond with large areas of yellow and black brick, stone dressings and a tiled roof. The plan comprises a three-and-a-half-bay nave with clerestory, chancel, north and south aisles and transepts, a south entrance porch, and a three-stage north-west tower crowned by a tall tiled spire. Trefoil windows predominate: paired lancets with trefoils light the tower's middle and upper stages, the great west window holds five trefoils, and trefoils combine with doubled and tripled lancets through the aisles, chancel, transepts and porch — while the clerestory breaks pattern with groups of two and three quatrefoils, an arrangement the critic Ian Nairn called "odd". Inside, the nave has a king-post arched roof on octagonal columns, with a similar but more sophisticated roof over the chancel, and the north aisle is cross-gabled. The fittings record the town's Victorian worthies: an oak-carved pulpit commemorates Simeon Norman, the prominent resident who built the Grade II listed Providence Strict Baptist Chapel; an oak lectern memorialises another local family; and Frederick Crunden, who gave to the building fund, helped decorate the interior and later donated the vicarage land, has his own memorials. There is an altar of stone and marble, an ornate chancel screen, an octagonal font, and the original pews survive. Some windows are by the Franz Mayer & Co. stained glass company of Munich, and another commemorates the local doctor who donated the organ. The spire clock, with four faces, was installed in 1887 for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and the tower carries a ring of eight bells, all cast by John Taylor & Co. of Loughborough — the tenor, sixth and fourth for the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, the seventh and fifth in 1900, and the third, second and treble in 1904.

Few structural changes have been made since: Talbot Bury himself designed the south aisle added in 1875, a vestry followed in 1889, a vicarage was built in Park Road in 1907 on land presented by a local doctor, and late in the twentieth century the north transept and aisle were screened off for flexible use, an arrangement formalised by the Diocese of Chichester in 1989. In the churchyard lies Annie Mackintosh, mother of the Antarctic explorer Aeneas Mackintosh; her grave carries a memorial to her son, who disappeared in the Antarctic in 1916 during Shackleton's Ross Sea party expedition.

As Burgess Hill grew to the north-east and west in the late nineteenth century, St John's planted churches to follow it. St Alban's Mission Hall in Fairfield Road, on the Clayton side, was built in 1885 for £324 and proved popular enough to gain an extension in 1907, serving for much of the twentieth century; the building survives as an Age Concern day centre. In 1887 Somers Clarke funded a second mission hall for the north-east of town, the area called World's End since the railway was built, which had developed quickly after Wivelsfield station reopened on a new site in 1886. The World's End Mission Room — reading room, schoolroom and worship space — gave way in 1899 to a corrugated-iron church on land of the businessman Sampson Copestake, who gave money and more land for a permanent church; the old hall became two shops. In 1902 a separate parish of St Andrew's was formed from portions of St John's and Ditchling parishes, and its permanent church, by Lacy W. Ridge — a red-brick Gothic Revival building with a very wide aisleless nave — was consecrated incomplete on 30 November 1908, its east end finished in 1924 and its planned tower never built. At the west end of town, a small Perpendicular-style stone cemetery chapel of the early twentieth century became St Edward the Confessor's, run from St John's as a place of Sunday worship, extended in brick in 1968 and given its own parish in 2000.

The church's recent history includes a dark chapter. On 5 April 2013 Hove Crown Court convicted the retired priest Keith Wilkie Denford, vicar of St John's, of sexually assaulting boys between 1987 and 1990, and the musician Michael Mytton, the church's organist, of offences between 1992 and 1994; Denford was jailed for eighteen months and Mytton received a suspended sentence. Mytton had been employed despite a 1981 conviction for gross indecency with a twelve-year-old boy at a parish in Uckfield. The convictions formed part of the wider scandal of past child abuse in the Diocese of Chichester.

St John the Evangelist's has been listed at Grade II* since 22 April 1950, one of fifty-four such buildings in the Mid Sussex district as of 2001. Its parish now serves the central part of Burgess Hill between the railway line and the A23 London Road, with St Andrew's covering the east of the town and St Edward the Confessor's the west, and the church celebrates the Eucharist twice each Sunday morning and again on Wednesdays — still the mother church of the brick-built town that grew up around it.