St Mary's Church, Hampden Park, Eastbourne

St Mary's Church, dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, is the Anglican parish church of Hampden Park, a northern suburb of Eastbourne in East Sussex — a hilltop church of 1954 by Edward Maufe, architect of Guildford Cathedral, called "one of his most charming designs" and among the first post-war churches in England to gain listed status. Its story carries one of the sharper scars of the Second World War: the original church of 1908 was destroyed by a German bomb in 1940, with only the bell tower surviving.

Until the early nineteenth century the area of present-day Eastbourne was thinly populated — four small settlements amid farmland, the oldest being Bourne, now the Old Town, with the ancient parish church. Development hugged the seafront until the twentieth century, when suburbs spread inland along the main roads and railway, served at first by the ancient parish church of Willingdon, a village soon surrounded by modern housing. Housing grew around Hampden Park railway station — initially named Willingdon — after it opened in 1888, and in June 1906 the vicar of Willingdon considered opening a chapel of ease for the area. He found powerful patrons in Freeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon — the future Viceroy of India — and his wife Marie: he gave the land, she organised a fundraising concert that added £200 to the building fund, and the Marchioness laid the first stone on 2 May 1908. The chapel opened that November, a Vernacular-style building of red brick, stone and tile with windows rising above the eaves, designed by William Hay Murray, a London-born architect who had practised in Hastings from 1874 and Eastbourne from about 1894, designing or altering several Anglican churches in both towns.

Attempts to make St Mary's independent of Willingdon failed in 1939, such changes having been suspended at the outbreak of war — and on 10 October 1940 a bombing raid by a Junkers Ju 88 destroyed the church entirely, leaving only the bell tower. A temporary building served as the church from 1945, but a separate parish still could not be created without a permanent building. In December 1948 the Diocese of Chichester commissioned Edward Maufe — nationally famous for Guildford Cathedral, and already the designer of the Bishop Hannington Memorial Church in Hove (1938), with St Nicholas' at Saltdean to follow — to design a new church on the site. Work began in 1952 and the church was ready in 1954, its east window receiving stained glass in 1953 by Moira Forsyth, daughter of the ceramicist Gordon Forsyth and Maufe's collaborator at Guildford Cathedral. The first incumbent, the Reverend Donald Carpenter, served twenty-one years and is commemorated by the clock on the south face of the tower; restoration and improvement work followed between 2000 and 2006.

The architectural historian Elain Harwood called the church "quintessential Maufe", featuring "the most distinctive elements of his personal style". It is a simplified, unadorned interpretation of Perpendicular Gothic Revival with domestic Vernacular touches — particularly the wood-framed nave windows — comprising a nave with buttressed north and south aisles, a chancel and apsidal sanctuary, a bellcote at the north-west corner, a Lady chapel, and, unusually for Maufe, an axially placed tower at the east end. The brick walls are painted white, the shallow-pitched roof laid with red pantiles, and the wide tower and hilltop position beside the park make the church stand out from the surrounding houses. The straight-headed west entrance sits beneath an arch with decorative moulding, a large simplified lancet in the pointed recess above. Inside, greyish-white render and a pale blue ceiling set off a series of pointed concrete transverse arches forming the arcades — square-based, without mouldings or capitals, recalling Maufe's St Thomas the Apostle at Hanwell of 1934 — while other features draw on the Scandinavian architecture Maufe loved, including Ivar Tengbom's Högalidskyrkan and Ragnar Östberg's City Hall in Stockholm. Each aisle bay has a square timber-framed leaded window; stone sedilia sit in an arched recess by the altar beneath a sanctuary ceiling decorated with stars; and the fittings include limed oak altar rails, a stone font with wooden cover, and a stone and rendered pulpit attached to the chancel arch. English Heritage listed the church at Grade II on 25 September 1998 — a rare distinction, since "post-1945 buildings have to be exceptionally important to be listed" — praising the "sculptural quality of its interior".

The parish covers Hampden Park in the north of Eastbourne, bounded by the railway line to the east, Maywood Avenue, Lindfield Road and Maplehurst Road to the north, and running south-west past Willingdon Road and north of Eridge Road and Eastbourne District General Hospital. Within a joint benefice with St Mary's stands St Peter's Church in the Hydneye estate east of the railway — begun in 1953, completed in the 1970s, originally planned as St Nicholas', and taking its dedication from the demolished St Peter's in the Meads, whose Charles Eamer Kempe stained glass was installed in the new building. Worship at St Mary's is in the modern Catholic style of the Church of England, with a Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion each Sunday morning, a further service later in the morning except on fifth Sundays, and Holy Communion on Thursday mornings — the life of a suburban parish carried on in the church that rose, charming and serene, from a bomb site on the hill by the park.