Basics

People

Properties

Can You Help?

Roads Off

Janet's Research

Sources & More

St Faith's Church Brentford, 1908 Journal Article

• Nave looking East
• Choir and Altar
• Ground plan
• The Sanctuary
• View of Church from East

The site has a baptismal certificate dating from 1905 for Doris Edith Cownden at St Faith's and early baptisms appear to have been recorded in the parish registers for both St Faith and St Paul (ancestry website). The earliest baptism found, 24th November 1901, was at 'St Faith's Mission'. Gillian Clegg's Brentford Past explains:
The mission district of St Faith's was established in 1901 by the then curate of St Paul's in his house in Windmill Road. The mission was to serve the growing population north of the railway line. St Faith's church was built in 1906-7 at a cost of £8,447. It was designed in Gothic revival style by G F Bodley and C G Hare.

The earliest reference I have found to St Faith's is in an article in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 6 June 1901 under a heading 'Preferments and Appointments':
Rev. William Arthur Steains Hewett, MA, late Acting-Chaplain to His Majesty's Forces in South Africa, and on the Staff of the Grahamstown Diocesan Railway Mission: to the Staff of the London Diocesan Home Mission, in charge of the new District of St Faith's, Brentford.
W A Hewett signed the register and certificate at the baptism of Doris Edith Cownden, noted above.

Five years later The Scotsman, 14 April 1906, noted under the heading 'More Churches For London. The Bishop's Fund':
More than one example could be quoted where a parish created under the influence of the fund has witnessed the growth of a daughter church. Thus out of St Paul's Brentford, has sprung St Faiths - the daughter, so to speak, of one of the fund's own churches, indicative of the wonderful change in that district in less than half a century.

The church was consecrated the next summer, as reported by the London Daily News, 15 July 1907:
The Bishop of London on Saturday evening consecrated the new Church of St. Faith at Brentford, which has been erected at a cost of £7,800, and towards which £6,885 has already been subscribed. In the course of his address the Bishop said London was full of immorality and terrible indifference, and there was a great deal of Sabbath desecration.

Wikipedia has more details of George Frederick Bodley, the architect, who died, age 80, in 1907. It notes he was 'articled to the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, a relative by marriage, under whose influence he became imbued with the spirit of the Gothic revival'.

Published October 2016