Churches
Cowley Road Congregational Church opened a mission hall in New Marston in 1885. This was replaced by a new building opened in 1939. It is now Marston United Reformed Church.
In 1919 the Church of England parish of St Nicholas, Marston opened a mission hall in Ferry Road to serve the parts of New Marston that had been built by that time. Somewhat later a campanile was added, its style and sand-lime brick suggesting that it is the work of the then Oxford Diocesan Architect T. Lawrence Dale.
In 1954-56 Saint Michael and All Angels parish church was built on Marston Road at the corner of Jack Straw's Lane as a chapel of ease for the parish of St Andrew, Headington. St Michael's was consecrated in September 1955 and superseded the Ferry Road mission hall, which was then deconsecrated and sold for secular use. In 1963 the Diocese of Oxford constituted St Michael's as a parish church, with its new parish formed from parts of Headington, Marston and St Clement's parishes.
St Michael's was designed by T.L. Dale in a "vaguely Italian renaissance style" that includes a slender campanile for its single bell. It has a statue of St Michael by Michael Groser and a reredos painted by Leon Underwood. St Michael's is unusual for its elliptical windows and for its tall, box-like chancel.
The Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh established the parish of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker in Oxford in 2006. The congregation worshipped in rented premises until 2010, when it acquired the former Church of England mission hall in Ferry Road and restored it to use as a church. The Russian congregation has added a small onion dome and a small mosaic picture of St Nicholas to the south gable of the building.
Read more about this topic: New Marston
Famous quotes containing the word churches:
“Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, and that Missionaries of that description from [France] would avail more than those who should endeavor to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)