St John The Baptist's Church, Crawley - The Parish

The Parish

The modern parish covered by the church is much larger than the ancient parish of Crawley. It covers most of the town west and north of the railway line between Gatwick Airport and Crawley railway stations, and up to the boundary of the airport. The present boundary is defined by the A23 London Road from its junction with the Horsham Road in Southgate to the edge of the Manor Royal industrial estate at County Oak; the southern perimeter road of Gatwick Airport—incorporating all the land and buildings in the former village of Lowfield Heath; some farmland and residential development east of the railway line at Tinsley Green; the railway line from Tinsley Green to Southgate Avenue, near Crawley railway station; and the northern part of the Southgate neighbourhood.

There are five extant churches in the parish. St Peter's in West Green predates the New Town, having been built between 1892 and 1893 to a design by architect W. Hilton Nash. Richard Cook, owner of one of Crawley's main building firms, constructed it. It replaced a chapel of ease to St Margaret's Church, Ifield: although West Green was in the parish of Ifield at the time, it was remote from the parish church. Although the Diocese of Chichester would not pay for a separate church, it accepted St Peter's, which was built with private money, when it was offered. The church later gained its own parish, which was then absorbed by the parish of St John the Baptist. St Elizabeth's in the centre of the Northgate neighbourhood was built in 1965, and like St John the Baptist's follows a "Modern Catholic" style of worship. St Richard's is another modern church serving the Three Bridges neighbourhood. A fifth church, St Michael and All Angels, is notionally within the parish but is no longer used for Anglican worship. William Burges designed and built this yellow sandstone 13th century-style French Gothic church in 1867 to serve the village of Lowfield Heath, which was then in the parish of Charlwood in Surrey. The establishment and rapid development of Gatwick Airport next to Lowfield Heath swamped the small village, eventually destroying it: all buildings except the church, which was listed at Grade II* in 1948, were demolished to make way for warehouses and extensions to the airport boundary. (The church is approximately 500 feet (150 m) from the runway.) The Diocese of Chichester stopped using the church for services in 2004; in March 2008 it allowed a Seventh-day Adventist congregation to use the building as its place of worship. Horley Seventh-Day Adventist Church was formed as a church plant in May 2005 and was formally established in January 2008.