1995 with 1928. Thorpe Bay Methodist Church rebuilt opposite St. Gregory’s, seen as roof in background. Smooth and fine grained red and modern blue bricks simulated a Victorian window, but it can be seen that the mortar thickens upwards because the blue bricks have not been cut into wedges in the old way.

1994 and c.1250. Salvation Army Hall and Community Centre, Frobisher Way, with St. Mary’s North Shoebury behind and actually next to a large Wal-Mart alias Asda Supermarket. The bricks are probably from the adjacent, now recently closed Starr Lane site in Great Wakering and show a red sandy texture like Friars Baptist Church. This hall replaces one of c.1900 on Ness Road in South Shoebury.

1991. Friars Baptist Church, named after a built-on farm in North Shoebury, is an real new church; with 69 members according to the 2004-5 Baptist Directory. The bricks are sandy with grey central and red marginal faces.

1984-5. Shoeburyness and Thorpe Bay Baptist Church rebuilt on their 1928 site as pale red brick with glass artwork in June 1985 and a yellow patinated brick hall of 1984. Between them there is what looked to me to be a newer red brick entrance but their website does not refer to it at all (www.shoeburybaptistchurch.org.uk).



Second View

Post-1973. There are two undated Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, post-1973. The unillustrated one on Highfield Crescent lacks a car park as well as windows and looks older than it is in red brick. The illustrated larger building on Southchurch Road illustrates the post-1960 practice of driving to worship of particular sects.

1977. Unitarians, with a similar dispersed membership and relatively large car park to the Brethren, were displace to this site from their Darnley Road chapel of 1897 by Queensway ring road. Modern blue and pale red bricks below a smaller potential carbon footprint provided by the singular invention of window.

1972. Brethren’s Meeting House, Fairfax Drive, with a minimalist ornament of 8 modern blue in cracked pale red Stretcher Bonded bricks, and virtually no natural light admitted. Presumably belongs to the Plymouth Brethren.

1970b. Christchurch, Free Church of England, Victoria Road, Leigh-on-Sea, replacing Reformed Episcopal one of 1920 there and dating back before 1900 as a low church split from St. Clement’s rather high status.

1970. Eastwood Baptist Church opened exactly 59 years after the now demolished first church in March 1970. It is of pale red bricks with a later extension. The first church was built by a retired Baptist minister from India, who also laid a 1913 stone at and doubtless funded West Leigh Baptist Church. His name was T.R. Edwards and as explained above his arrival stimulated the Anglican Church cause in western Eastwood and probably the Peculiars as well (see 1934 and 1966). But looking at legal documents forland along Rayleigh Road, there was (in 1907) a prohibition on building any public buildings selling drinks or providing any species of amusement except presumably church activities.

1968c. This logo of Earls Hall Baptist Church in Prittlewell is on the front and south hall addition faced with brownish sandy bricks. Most bays of the hall on the north side are of pale rid bricks with the same ornamentation as Elim 1950; but according to a 1975 leaflet by R.J.H. Banks laid in 1954-5. The first baptist service in the now hidden Pryors Private School took place on November 18, 1939.

1968b. Southend Evangelical Church displaced by downtown development from the 1877 Milton Street/Lambert Street Peculiar Peoples Chapel. The stone reporting this information shows a rugose coral in a probable Waulsortian reef limestone, with laminated siltstone slabs laid around it and yellowish bricks elsewhere.

1968a. Roman Catholic St. Peter Church, Eastwood viewed from the ancient Owlshall Wood of Quercus petraea after demolition of the small 1955 concrete church had reduced the car parking space.

1967. Southend and Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, with foundation stone laid by a Rabbi who was prominent enough locally for me to remember the name and another stone giving the architects name as Norman Green. The yellowish bricks resemble those in 1984 part of the Shoebury Baptist Church and in the other building Hadleigh 1957. The previous Orthodox sites of 1911-2 and 1921 have been sold and they now worship at this single but larger location.

1966. Anglican St. David Church, Eastward, with hall in cream coated rather than yellow coated bricks dating from 1979 on the right. If I remember correctly the bell and bracket, not unlike those on the 1922 School Chapel illustrated above, came from the original shed-like structure in Gale’s brickyard, built of his own London ashes bricks and in response to the opening of an adjacent Baptist Church in 1911. That building and a later one with a red brick front to a lower corrugated iron roof have now been demolished from their site further to the right than the new hall. Where the road there meets Rayleigh Road, at the S.E. corner of the present church grounds, there was once a gate into the now destroyed Rayleigh Park which continued eastwards on the north side to include the future brickyard as well as St. David’s.

1963b and 1938. Anglican St. Peter Church, Prittlewell, Eastbourne Grove. Rebuilt church on site of 1933 is inconspicuous despite being on the skyline due to the thin nature of the spire on the high angle roof seen in distance here. Walls of yellowish brick and concrete with flint pebble ornament, also has image of a fish in coloured tiles just inside door. My photograph shows the two older halls in foreground, both of the 1950 photograph wavy red bricks but paler when facing the air raid rest centre than the 1930’s style hall in the middle. A similar one of St. Lawrence Eastwood was illustrated as part of a set of six coloured postcards commissioned by Medhurst’s Shop and taken in 1938. Probably they were built just after the 1936 Royal Coronation.

1963a. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Glenwood Avenue, Eastwood, in modern yellow bricks and area of facing with polygonal Kentish Ragwork.

1961a. Clarence road or Central Baptist Church, Southend, is not illustrated except in background to 1887 photograph. The original buildings of 1883 and 1902, reviewed as Particular Baptist by Kaye (1999), were rebuilt by one with a stone of 25 January 1961. Pale smooth red bricks and some concrete rectangles with flint pebbles embedded in it.




1961b. United Reformed/Anglican Bridgewater Drive – Hilltop Building use for services. Built as Bridgewater Drive Congregational. Grey facings appear to be concrete tiles.

1960. Anglican St. Luke, Prittlewell Church showing squared rubble of probably Forest Marble with Liostrea and Kentish Ragstone on extension beyond brick (1984-5 photo of type) and tile faced wall. Currently has a looser but similar association with Roman Catholics as St. Cedd’s has with U.C.R.

1957. Anglican St. Barnabus Church, Hadleigh and therefore just outside Southend-on-Sea, within sight of Leigh. Illustrated to show the modern Malm bricks with black spots seen in many 1960’s buildings illustrated below looking yellow in the distance. Here early and dated by the stone on the left dated June 11, 1957.

1956. Anglican St. Aidan Church, so called Leigh-on-Sea, but on site of Beggarsbush Farm, Eastwood parish. First church, now hall on left had bell not removed to new 1971 church on right. Both of smooth red bricks and some concrete.

1955b. Whittingham Avenue Methodist church with no sign of the 1923 gothic edifice reported by Kaye (1999, Chapels of Essex) in secular use. New Church of smooth red bricks of sandy composition and grey 5 mm grog.

1955a. St. John Fisher Roman Catholic Church, Manners Way, Prittlewell, better known as Cuckoo corner on the A127 from London. The Catholic directory conflicts with Kelly’s 1940 in suggesting a 1939 date for the site. My photograph shows the 1955 building with a white statue of the former Bishop of Rochester (c.1469-1535) reproduced better in coloured Tudor clothes on the 1964 church of smaller, similarly smooth red and some modern blue bricks. The illustrated car park wall shows the melted local bricks termed Burrs. The saint is also local Rochester being opposite Southend behind the Isle of Grain Erasmus reported that ‘there is a persistent rumour here, probably true, that when the King discovered that the Bishop of Rochester had been appointed to the college of Cardinals by Paul III, he speedily had him led out of prison and beheaded. In this fashion did the King bestow upon him the red hat”.

1954. The Brigwater Drive Church, now a joint Anglican-United Reformed Church with services at their 1961b building, built as parish church within Prittlewell termed St. Cedds. Stone laid inside porch by Admiral Godfrey in October 30, 1954 and consecrated the next year, with the ships on the spire and gates added later also to reflect the maritime associations of Southend in 1939-45 war. I remember going in a crocodile of Eastwood Infants school children in December, probably 1955, to a Christmas crib and probable consecration service. The incumbent called himself father and it was not until I went in again in 2007 that I discovered it was not a Roman Catholic Church and never was. Shows smooth red bricks and they have applied to place a microwave transmitting phone mast on the uplifting spire as another own goal.

1953. St. Edmunds Community Hall is secular but hired for Sunday services, but originated as a new Anglican parish church in Prittlewell with a stone laid by the rector E.N. Gowing seen outside it.

1950. Elim Pentecostal or George Kingston Memorial Church, Leigh-on-Sea, has this clearly dated rebuilt front of pale red wavy-ornament bricks behind a garden wall of the melted London ashes bricks termed Burrs (see 1955a). In 1924 Elim Gospel Hall appears on the site in Kelly’s Directory and this indicates that it is one of the 70 assembles in Great Britain and Ireland formed into a fellowship then. The name Elim originated in Ireland rather than in the U.S.A. Pentecostal movement as I had assumed, and as recently as 1915.



Foundation stone of rebuilt Gendale Gradens Elim Church dates pale red bricks with herringbone ornament.

1948. Anglican St. Stephen Church, Alton Gardens, Prittlewell, is dated by the subdivision of the parish and by the resemblance of at least one of the buildings behind the show fronts to a prefabricated concrete air-raid rest centre intended to last for ten years after about 1940. These were to a common feature of Southend schools in the mid 1960’s Earls hall Baptist Church go one in 1946 and kept it for 22 years, and St. Peter’s Prittlewell appears to have kept theirs.

?c. 1940. St. Cecilias Christian Spiritualist Church, Leigh, has no date but appeared between the 1940 and 1950 editions of Kelly’s Directory. The bricks front could be later and the large car park certainly is.

1939c. Roman Catholic St. George and the English Martyrs Church, Shoeburyness. The Catholic Directory England and Wales Gabriel Communications 1004 pp. gives dates of 1862, 1891, and 1939 for the large site but this ugly, if memorable tower, shows many features of the 1939 date. Although the window arched heads have relieving arches, they are external in a manner thought unsightly in the 19th Century and below them whole bricks are stuck in vertically in the style of the 1930’s. The Malm bricks are no longer of the finest quality, despite the latter being made nearer to the church in 1900 than inferior grey types also seen in the 1869 R.C. church at Southend. Even there the London ashes bricks were somewhat yellow and mixed with red and blue ornamental courses. This grey 1939 tower and a cinema of 1913-55 stand at the end of the famous A13 road from London, recently giving its name to a salacious novel.

1939b. Eastwood United Reformed Church, built as Christchurch Congregational by 1940 edition of Kelly’s and with stones laid in July 12 1939 “to the Prince of Peace” by minister and also widow of Thomas Dowsett (compare 1900c). brownish concrete used for window ashlar, smooth pale red bricks in stretching Bond for walls but porch resembles 1939a.

c.1939a. The Gospel Hall, built on Carlton Avenue as Ebenezer Gospel Hall between 1937 and 1940 editions of Kelly’s Directory of Southend. Tiles used for arches between smooth dark red bricks in Flemish Bond. The unusual use of two steps to the porch is mirrored in the otherwise different 1939b church.

c. 1938. With 1969 behind on left. Anglican St. James the Great Church, Leigh-0n-Sea, was originally dedicated to unspecified St. James. The hall of probably 1938 shows this original name as well as wavy ornamentation on the pale red bricks. I could not photograph the rebuilt church a on a site of 1933 as building work was going on, but I previously noted a consecration stone of 15 February 1969 and darker, smooth red bricks on it.

1936. Southend Friends [Quaker] Meeting house, Dundonald Drive, also shows unusual diagonal red brick courses in the porch.

1935. Anglican St. Mellitus Centre, Prittlewell is a church for deaf and dump people photographed here from the unpainted back to show London ashes below red bricks in Flemish Bond.

1934c. Anglican St. Andrew Church and hall, Westcliff, shows no ashlar and has a bell tower like Christchurch 1921. Being at a bend on Westborough Road it is still an attractive urban landmark, but might be improved by some white paint at close range.

1934b. Leighfields Road Evangelical Church built against two steep loess sides in Leighfields brickfield as Eastwood Peculiar Peoples Chapel. A new part is added at the back and this old front lacks memorials and a display of the local brick products. A gospel hall, more recently a demolished barber’s shop, was probably built by the Peculiars before this church but continued in religious use opposite Bell House Road on Rayleigh Road until after 1940.

1934a. Anglican St. Augustine Church Thorpe Bay reminds me of Passchendaele Church after it was captured by Canadians in 1917. Probably additional expenditure on a small spire or battlements would make it look less like a ruin or power station cooling system. It originated as an iron church in the new suburb in 913, near Thorpe Bay train station, which opened in 1911. Most windows have an oolite ashlar with small Jurassic shells in it. These windows are small compared to the depressing bricks and the flattish roof makes it look as if it has not got one.

1933c with 1929d behind. The Leigh Salvation Army Hall on Elm Road dates back to before 1901. The present structures look later than that and include this smooth red brick front with memorials of June 3, 1933. In the distance is a child minding centre in the former Peculiar Peoples Chapel. It was dated to 1929 by reference to Kelly’s Directory street logs. It has still biblical texts in front memorial stones and London ashes bricks between red brick side buttresses. There used to be a helpful sign on a house between these Christian buildings, which had a hand pointing to the Elm Road traffic and read “prepared to meet thy God”. Probably it originally was intended to direct people to the Peculiars and has gone since their departure.

1933b. Elim International Gospel Centre in Westcliff appeared on this site as Elim Gospel Hall in the 1933 Kelly’s Directory. The central building looks like St. Andrew’s Church Hall on an adjacent Anglican site of 1930 (compare 1934c).

1933a. Shoebury Evangelical Church, previously a Peculiar People’s Chapel, and before 1933 meeting at number 83 on the same West Road. See introduction for description of the London ashes bricks seen also in front.





Shoebury 2nd view.