Photo Essay: St. John the Baptist Church, Greenhill

While waiting for my darling princess to finish her dramatics class, I wandered over to the nearby church, St. Johns, Greenhill, Harrow, which I had noticed while getting to the club building. Its an interesting little church. Well, its not so little but its quite big, specially when considering the size of the original Harrow town. Quite big. Here’s the history behind the church. Its comparatively quite new compared to some of the other churches in the area.

This is the back end of the church, well, you can make it out with the line of garbage bins.  

Steeply sloping roofs with the commonly used albion stone walls.

The windows of the rear of the church. Strangely enough, none of the windows were stained.

Just outside the church, there is this bench. And the town council, in its amazing judgement, decided to plonk a stinking garbage bin right in front. Now why would you do that? really silly.

 

The main window of the church seen from the back.  

There is a World War 2 memorial here.

Now moving towards the entrance of the church

The notice board.

The side entrance. 

And there is the most adorable cute tiny little door on the side, mostly hidden by the shrubbery. I wonder what it would be used for?

 

A tree stump which has been cut down.  

The main entrance. It was really a lovely day, as I keep on saying, if you wanted to see iridescent green, you need to come to England during summer to see this colour. The only other place where I have seen this shade is in South Africa.

And the church is open :)

Tall narrow buttresses… 

Presumably this was the main door at one time but now has been locked up pretty much for keeps. Even the door handle has been removed.

The hinges were seriously works of art. Can you see how intricately carved they are? lovely.
 

The main north facing windows

looking back at the main street, with the advertisement on the bus advertising Terminator..

 

The church’s these days are obviously dying, attendance is very poor and when buildings become derelict, they attract the wrong crowds. Far too frequently, I see churches being used by druggies and homeless people for nefarious purposes. So churches, instead of being houses of god, open to all, are far too frequently surrounded by barbed wire, tall fences, bottles of booze and ciggies. Welcome to hell. 

More neat stonework


Presumably the foundation stones on the entrance lintel stones.

The altar. The windows at the back are the windows which I saw right at the beginning. See? no stained glass windows..



The internal stonework is very nice, you can see the two chapels on both sides. The pulpit was also nicely carved.

I couldn't take the pictures of the war memorials templates on the left hand side chapel, but here are the pictures from the Church’s website. These are the names of the parish men who died in the first great war.

Then you have the World War II memorial.

Full slide show here.