| Notes about the Church |
There is something special and unique about the parish of Broadstairs, stemming from the long-standing devotion to our Blessed Lady. This dates back at least to the tenth century, when pilgrims from all over England and the continent flocked to the shrine of St Mary’s Chapel, in what is now Albion Street, and which is the oldest building in Broadstairs. Mariners who rounded the point would reverently lower their topsails in salute. St Mary’s was destroyed in the violence accompanying the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: for three hundred years Broadstairs had neither chapel nor priest.
Just as the little chapel in Gladstone Road had been so full at Mass that the congregation overflowed into the garden and the road, so before long the tin chapel was proving much too small. Efforts were made to acquire a new site for a permanent church. Just like today many events were held to gather funds. Fortunately, in 1928, the magnificent site of the present church was given to the parish. In May 1930 the foundation stone was laid by the Bishop of Southwark.
Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott om ra friba (the architect of the Anglican Liverpool Cathedral) the new church was begun in 1930. It is built of flint faced with stone, producing the effect of an ancient building. All nations were represented in its style. The campanile being typically Spanish, the sanctuary Celtic, as built by Irishmen throughout Italy in the Middle Ages, the nave Kentish and the wood British Oak. The building combined the Gothic with the Norman and although the first impression might be surprising the architecture was well thought out. It is reputed to have been said that Sir Giles designed the church to reflect the local environment, the sea and farmlands, the tower the lighthouse, the sanctuary an oast house and the nave a barn, and flints were used, the local stone. Sir Giles proudly described this as his ‘Thanet Gem’. At the time finances were only available for the sanctuary, tower and half the nave to be built, so the west wall was finished in wood until funds were raised to finish the building.
In the early 1950s the parish set about the task of completing the church. In 1962 the church was finished with only one variation from Sir Giles’ original conception in the form of a somewhat massive screen with stone dressings, mullioned windows and swing doors in ring-cupped oak at the west end, with a gallery overhead. The narthex thus formed providing an area for material affairs, helping to keep quiet the main body of the church.
In 1878 Captain and Mrs Arthur Rutt came to live in Broadstairs. They adapted and enlarged a brick building in the garden of their home at 2 Gladstone Road to make a public chapel under the title of Our Lady Star of the Sea. Here Mass was celebrated, by the monks of St Augustine’s Abbey, for the first time since the time of the Tudors. On moving to Ramsgate in 1888, Captain and Mrs Rutt, anxious that Mass should continue to be celebrated in Broadstairs, provided a plot of land in St Peter’s Park Road for a church to be built: a tin church was completed and furnished within six weeks.
While the Catholic community of Broadstairs now had a church to worship in, there was still no resident clergy, the parish being served directly by the monks of St Augustine’s Abbey who had arrived in Ramsgate in 1858. It was not until 1909 that the parish acquired its first fully resident priest who was duly provided with a presbytery opposite the church.
For nearly a century the Broadstairs parish was served by the Benedictine Fathers from Ramsgate, but the Abbot and Community of St Augustine’s Abbey were now obliged to hand over the parish to the Archbishop of Southwark. January 1969 marked a new chapter in the history of the parish with the arrival of the diocesan clergy. In the early 1970s there was a breathtakingly beautiful transformation of the Sanctuary, the installation of the magnificent bath stone altar of reservation, as well as that of the permanent marble altar so that Mass could be celebrated facing the people. The sanctuary floor was renewed and the redecoration of the church put underway, with the reredos in the Lady Chapel re-gilded in gold leaf, while the Sacred Heart Chapel was also decorated to blend in with the whole scheme. |
Those periods with zero data may span several decades. The first may include pre 1530 records.