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Mitcham
St Olave

Built: 1928
Architect: A C Martin
Listing: not listed

The church was dedicated on 26th June 1928 but planned to a most ambitious scheme. A drawing in the vestry shows a structure designed with a further bay on the nave and a west bell tower. This scheme presumably foundered for lack of finance, in those difficult and depressed years leading up to the 1939-45 war. It would have been a startling revelation, surrounded as it now is, by a somewhat mundane, suburban landscape. The west end, facing down Church Walk and planned to be its climax, is now seen as nothing more than a depressing wall of plain fletton bricks, with a quite well designed but rather dwarfed, modern porch extension (constructed in 1978).

But there are surprises in store. The massive tenor bell, hung in the angle of the nave and baptistry walls, the spatially stunning but plain neo-Byzantine interior and the astonishingly adventurous technical solution to the problem of constructing such a building, with its dome and abutting barrel vaults.

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