List of places of worship in Crawley
The borough of Crawley, in West Sussex, England, has 43 churches, chapels and other buildings used specifically for worship. Other religious communities meet in community centres, schools and other buildings whose primary function is secular. Three other former places of worship are no longer used by their original congregation, although only one of these has fallen out of use entirely. The borough covers the New Town of Crawley, whose development began in the late 1940s, and Gatwick Airport—an international airport which has two multi-faith chapels of its own. The New Town absorbed three villages with a long history of Christian worship, and later extensions to the boundary have brought other churches into the borough.
Crawley has a majority Christian population, but it has a much larger proportion of Muslim and Hindu residents than England overall. There are two Hindu temples and a Hindu centre (Swaminarayan Manor), a Sikh gurdwara and three mosques. A Quaker meeting house in the Ifield area is one of the oldest in the world.
Several churches have listed status in view of their architectural and historical importance, but most places of worship date from the postwar era when the New Town was developed, and are of modest architectural merit: Nikolaus Pevsner stated in 1965 that those built up to that time were "either entirely uneventful or more often mannered and contorted, with odd spikes and curvy roofs".
Most of the borough's 44.97 km2 (17.36 sq mi) area is covered by Crawley New Town. The area around the villages of Three Bridges, Crawley and Ifield was selected by the British Government as the site for one of the developments proposed in the New Towns Act 1946. The Government set up a Development Corporation, headed by Sir Thomas Bennett, to coordinate the work. Anthony Minoprio designed the plans, and building work started in the late 1940s and continued until the late 1980s. The New Town consisted of self-contained neighbourhoods, each of which had at least one Anglican church. The Development Corporation's intention was for one to be placed at the centre of each neighbourhood, and for churches of other Christian denominations to occupy sites where they could serve a larger area covering several neighbourhoods. This plan was followed as far as practicable. The Corporation provided the freehold of the land on which churches were built at 25% of the price that applied for residential land use.
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