All Saints Church
All Saints Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS23 2NL
During the mid-19th century a small number of Oxford dons and Cambridge undergraduates lit a fire in the belly of the drab national church which came to have the most profound effect upon architecture and patterns of worship throughout the world-wide Anglican communion.
Vitality poured forth from the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Camden Society. Scholarly research into the principles of Gothic architecture and pre-Reformation English worship became a passion, and as with all passions some devotees went too far.
Fears of Rome, revolution, republicanism and all things foreign were part of English paranoia and the restoration of chancels, organs, stained glass, statues, vestments, robed choirs and ritual whipped up sufficient hysteria to see clergy arraigned before the courts on spurious charges including the placing of candlesticks on altars! It is so very difficult for 21st century man to comprehend, let alone be associated with such sentiments of suspicion, until we realise that today’s fears between Islam and the West lead us in similar directions. Do we learn nothing from history?
All Saints Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS23 2NL