The Arts are central to church life. Many of our activities take place within beautiful buildings which our services combine drama, literature, music, poetry and visuals. Our churches are also places to enjoy cultural programmes including concerts and exhibitions as well as being places to see art and architecture.
Please do contact our churches to check opening times in advance of your visit.
Cultural Programmes
St Mary’s Live is a monthly series of Music and Entertainment at St Mary & All Saints Church, Langdon Hills. See here for more information.
Unveiled is a regular Friday night arts and performance event at St Andrew’s Wickford. See here for more information. The Unveiled arts and performance evening together with a programme of art and heritage exhibitions deliver new cultural offers in Wickford. The initiative aims are to bring high quality art and performance to Wickford while also encouraging local talent by providing new platforms for local performers and artists. See here for more information.
Craft groups also meet at St John’s Langdon Hills and St Andrew’s Wickford. Our church halls are also regularly used by local arts and crafts groups.
As a new town, Basildon has a rich cultural heritage in part through the influence of Vin Harrop as director of the original Arts Centre. Depeche Mode and Yazoo emerged from the Town’s music scene, and to some extent from the churches, in the 1980s to achieve international success. Culture and entertainment in the area can also be found at the Towngate Theatre and Barleylands. Basildon-Eastgate Art encourages artists in the Basildon area giving them the chance to exhibit their work. BasildON Creative People and Places is a radical, cultural programme for people living, working and socialising in Basildon borough. Bas-Arts-Index is a home for Basildon’s creatives to connect and collaborate.
Art and Architecture
St Martin of Tours in Basildon is a repository of marvellous art in a uniquely modern building, the design of which was the work of local architect Trena M. Cotton. Amazing stained glass windows tell the story of St Martin, depict the Cross, Resurrection, and Holy Trinity before depicting God’s presence flowing as a river down through the Thames Barrier into the hustle and bustle of Basildon itself. The magnificent stained glass window in the Lady Chapel has symbols of the Blessed Virgin Mary in heaven, and signs of the universe, clouds, sky, stars, the sun and the moon. The church also contains Stations of the Cross by Jackie Hopwood.
Above the south door of the church is a fibreglass figure of our Lord pierced by shafts of light, with his hands outstretched towards the town in service of the people. It is an invitation of welcome to all to enter. The sculpture was designed by Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones in 1968. The work of Huxley-Jones also features elsewhere within the Diocese. His Woman of Samaria is a fibreglass figure at St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch, while at Chelmsford Cathedral, Huxley-Jones’ work includes a Christus in St Cedd’s Chapel, a carving of St Peter on the south-east corner of the South Transept and 16 stone carvings representing the history and concerns of Essex, Chelmsford, and the Church. Huxley-Jones and his wife Gwynneth Holt, who was also a sculptor, lived in Broomfield, Essex. Broomfield was also home to the artist Rosemary Rutherford (see St Peter’s Nevendon below). Works by Huxley-Jones, Holt and Rutherford can be found at churches throughout the Diocese of Chelmsford.
A statue by the sculptor Peter Foster depicting St Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar can be found in the Remembrance precinct adjacent to St Martin’s.
A freestanding Bell Tower designed by Douglas Galloway RIBO and built in 1999 was opened by Her Majesty the Queen and dedicated by The Rt. Revd. John Perry The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford on Friday 12th March 1999.
Other works of art of note in Basildon include: the Mother and Child sculpture and raised pool designed by the French sculptor Maurice Lambert; the Cats Cradle Pussiwillow III Clock in the Eastgate Shopping Centre; the Radion lenticular screen that explores Basildon’s past and present with a focus on nature and heritage within the borough; and the sculpture trail at Wat Tyler Park which has Progression by Michael Condron and After the uprising by Robert Koenig among the works able to be seen.
The East Window at St Peter’s Nevendon has important stained glass by Rosemary Rutherford. It illustrates the Transfiguration with the central figure being Christ flanked by Moses on the left and Elijah on the right. St Peter kneels in the centre with St John to the left and his brother St James to the right. An exhibition on the life and work of Rosemary Rutherford can be viewed at St Mary and St Leonard’s, Broomfield. Rosemary’s father was the vicar at this church which contains several examples of her stained glass windows and a fresco in its Tower of Christ Stilling the Storm, which is the only true fresco in an English church.
The churches in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry feature as a case study in the Gods’ Collections research project. St Andrew’s Wickford has stained-glass by local artists Val Anthony and Christine Daniels and banners by Julia Glover, plus a painting by internationally exhibited artist David Folley. Folley’s large The Descent from the Cross is a major work by an artist who has exhibited widely across the UK and Europe. The reredos at St Catherine’s Wickford was given to the church by Vicar and Churchwardens of All Saints’ Margaret Street. It is by William Butterfield, the architect of All Saints, and is said to be one of the finest of its kind. A copy, by local artist Bruce Revell, of John Constable’s ‘The Ascension’ can also be seen at St Catherine’s.
The colouring of the screen at St Mary’s and the murals on one pillar in the south aisle dates from the 1930s-1950s and was undertaken, by his sons, under the guidance of then Rector, Revd John Edward Bazille-Corbin to ‘reproduce as closely as possible’ the decoration of the medieval church. A large painting of ‘The Baptism of Our Lord’ is by Enid Chadwick of Walsingham. Local woodworker David Garrard crafted Stations of the Cross using the motif of the Runwell Cross also building an altar together with an inscribed cross for the side chapel. See here for more information.
