Parish Churches
King Stephen granted land at Grove to the Benedictine Abbey of Bermondsey in 1142.
Grove is said to have had a chapel of St. John the Baptist until it was destroyed in 1733. It would have been a chapelry of the ecclesiastical parish of Wantage, of which Grove was a part until the 1830s. A new Church of England parish church was built in 1832 and Grove was made into a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1835.
The 1832 building was replaced by a new parish church of St. James the Great built in 1900 or 1901. St. James' was a Gothic Revival building in an Early English Gothic style with six bays and a south aisle. It was designed by P.A. Robson, son of the architect Edward Robert Robson. The font is an 18th century wooden one brought from All Saints' parish church, Pusey. In the 1960s Sir Nikolaus Pevsner found St. James' to be derelict.
In the 1960s a new parish church of St. John the Baptist was built to replace St. James'. The foundation stone is dated 1965. It incorporates items from St. James' including the font, a stained glass window depicting St. James and a panel listing successive vicars of the parish.
Read more about this topic: Grove, Oxfordshire
Famous quotes containing the words parish and/or churches:
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