St Mary, Thorpeness

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Although there are roads, the village was not really designed for cars, which is a mercy, and the whole piece enfolds a large lake called the Meare. The charming guidebook Concerning Thorpeness by Moira Coleman recalls the story that before the construction of the earliest buildings, there was extensive flooding in what were then open fields: Mr Ogilvie came to survey the floods... he is reputed to have said, on a foggy November afternoon in 1910, "let's keep it, and build a holiday village around it, and thus the Meare was born. The lake is punctuated by islands, and on these were placed characters from Peter Pan, which had been written and first performed six years earlier. Its author JM Barrie was a close friend of Ogilvie, and as James Bettley notes, it is as if Thorpeness were a Never Never Land, designed to suit Peter and all the other boys (and girls) who never grew up. It is all at once kitschy and surreal, wholly entrancing and compelling. I love it.

And so, Thorpeness became popular with holiday-makers as an adventurous and excitingly new destination. In the 1930s, it was a favoured resort of colonial civil servants and their families back home on leave from Empire, but the Second World War rang the death knell on its life as a holiday village. Wartime restrictions placed both Thorpeness and Sizewell out of bounds, and the years of austerity after the war meant that, although much more had been planned including a Venetian-style piazza, it would never be built. In 1972, the estate was broken up and sold off into private ownership after the death of Ogilvie's son. and although many of the cottages are now holiday homes, this is now to a large extent just another Suffolk residential community, albeit an extraordinary one.

The church is perhaps the least entrancing feature of Thorpeness. It was the last piece of the planned village to be built, to the design of WG Wilson, and was completed in 1937. In retrospect it is unfortunate that design and construction were left to so late a date, for it was entirely informed by the concrete modernist style of the late 1930s which was regularly used for electricity substations and the like. It replaced an earlier wooden church that Arthur Mee had seen here in the early 1930s. The inspiration seems to have been the fortress churches of southern France, with a hefty crossing tower connecting the tall, wide nave and token crossings and chancel. Blind brick arcading in the walls led Mortlock to surmise that later aisles were intended, although this may just have been an affectation of the age as at the contemporary All Hallows in Ipswich.

St Mary was effectively a chaplaincy, ostensibly a non-denominational church, but the chaplain was the vicar of Aldringham, thus making it a kind of chapel of ease to the parish church. By the 1970s it was only being used in summer. When I first came this way in the late 1990s the church had been boarded up for a decade, and was falling into decay, but had recently been sold to property developers. You can see the photographs I took that day at the bottom of the page. Steps led up to a forecourt and west doorway, and I recall the thousands of fragments of burnt paper scattered around it. On closer examination, they were the remains of hymn books.

The church had a west gallery, and a small baptistery. The east window contained a simple cross picked out in coloured glass, and this is now displayed rather awkwardly on the wall in Aldringham church. The developers originally applied for permission to demolish the church, but this was not granted, and so instead it was developed into apartments. St Mary was always the least successful part of Mr Ogilvie's dream, but you can't help thinking that it was doomed from the start by its design in comparison with Thorpeness's other buildings. The only surprise is that Ogilvie did not commission Forbes Glennie to design a secular building in the style of a church, for even if it wasn't a real church, the village feels slightly diminished without one.