The Chapel of Lancing College, West Sussex
In the first of two articles, John Goodall looks at the recent completion of the chapel of Lancing College, one of the great landmarks of the Sussex coast
LANCING COLLEGE CHAPEL was begun in 1868 with the intention that it should be one of the defining landmarks of the Sussex coastline. That ambition—it claims today to be the fourth-tallest ecclesiastical building in the British Isles—would in the ordinary run of things surely have doomed it to incompletion and abandonment. There was nothing ordinary, however, either about this astonishing building or the man who conceived it, clergyman Nathaniel Woodard. Construction has continued in fits and starts through several changes of design and the chapel was finally completed, after 154 years, on April 23, 2022, with the dedication of a new western porch designed by the architect Michael Drury.
Woodard was born in 1811, the ninth of 12 children of an Essex farmer, and absorbed a strong religious devotion from his mother, which included a particular care for those at sea. Financial difficulties delayed his attempts to enter the Church, but, in 1834, he married and secured a place at Oxford. At this moment, the established Church not only faced internal calls for reform, but felt outwardly beset by the rise of non-conformity, irreligion in Britain’s burgeoning industrial cities and Catholic emancipation. Indeed, as Woodard began his university studies, the Oxford Movement, which would carry a cohort of celebrated clergy—and some of his friends —over to Rome, was already under way.
Woodard did not follow, but his High Church or Tractarian sympathies shaped his early career. In1843, ascurateofStBartholomew’s, in London’s Bethnal Green, he preached a sermon in which his ideas about confession prompted a complaint. He was forced to resign and, after another unhappy period in a neighbouring parish, he secured a living at Shoreham, West Sussex, an ancient port town that had fallen into modest Victorian prosperity. The 35-year-old curate was shocked by the dislocation between the town and the church, as well as by the lack of any formal provision for the education of its professional class. Accordingly, on January 11, 1847, he opened a small day school in the vicarage, with a curriculum that included such subjects as navigation and bookkeeping.
Woodard’s time in London had given him some important connections and also, perhaps, confidence as a campaigner. Certainly, he pursued causes with an absolute determination and phenomenal success, aided by charm, humour and an earnest sense of high purpose. In March the following year, he published a pamphlet entitle
