Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley
| St Francis and St Anthony Church | |
|---|---|
| Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony | |
The church from the north
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| 51°06′48″N 0°11′16″W / 51.1133°N 0.1878°WCoordinates: 51°06′48″N 0°11′16″W / 51.1133°N 0.1878°W | |
| Location | Haslett Avenue West, Crawley, West Sussex RH10 1HR |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Denomination | Roman Catholic |
| Website | http://crawley.parishportal.net/ |
| History | |
| Founded | 12 October 1861 |
| Founder(s) | Francis Scawen Blunt |
| Dedication | Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua |
| Dedicated | 1861 (original church) |
| Architecture | |
| Status | Parish church |
| Functional status | Active |
| Heritage designation | Grade II-listed |
| Designated | 25 October 2007 |
| Architect(s) | Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (present church) |
| Groundbreaking | 1958 (present church) |
| Completed | 18 November 1959 (present church) |
| Demolished | 1955 (original church) |
| Administration | |
| Parish | Crawley |
| Deanery | Crawley |
| Archdiocese | Southwark (formerly) |
| Diocese | Arundel and Brighton |
| Province | Southwark |
The Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony is a Roman Catholic church in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. The town's first permanent place of Roman Catholic worship was founded in 1861 next to a friary whose members, from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, had been invited to the area by a wealthy local family of Catholic converts. Crawley's transformation from a modest market town to a rapidly growing postwar New Town in the mid-20th century made a larger church necessary, and in the late 1950s the ecclesiastical architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was commissioned to build a new church. The friary closed in 1980 and has been demolished, but the large brick church still stands in a commanding position facing the town centre. English Heritage has listed the building at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.
Crawley was founded in the early 13th century as a market town, and a church dedicated to St John the Baptist was founded a century later. The town lay partly in the parish of Ifield, a neighbouring village: the parish boundary ran up the middle of the wide High Street.
After the English Reformation, Anglicanism predominated in the area, Protestant Nonconformity also became well established, and Roman Catholicism was almost unknown. A survey in 1582 found that two inhabitants of Ifield parish were recusants. By the mid-19th century, the centuries-old hostility towards Roman Catholicism held by many Anglicans in Sussex had faded, and conversions from the established Church to Catholicism were becoming more common. Prominent local examples of this included several members of the Blunt family, the wealthy owners of the Crabbet Park estate just outside Crawley.
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