Vale Road Methodist Church

Reprint of an article that appeared in the Summer 2011 Edition of Common Ground.

By Philip Whitbourn.

Much consternation was caused recently, by an application to demolish Vale Royal Methodist Church in London Road, and to build a five-storied angular modern block in its place, incorporating fourteen flats above a new place of worship.

The church was built in 1878 by the well-known local firm of Willicombe and Oakley, to the design of the London architect Charles Bell. The building is in an early Gothic style and is faced with Kentish rag-stone, with Bath stone dressings and shafts of granite.

When the scheme was turned down, a person from the church was reported to have commented that it was not as though they were wanting to knock down Westminster Abbey. That, however, is not at all the point. If Westminster Abbey was to be taken as the benchmark for meriting conservation, then few historic buildings would survive in Kent. Canterbury Cathedral perhaps, but not much else.

The Kentish town of Dover boasts a noble castle, and Maidstone an Archbishops Palace. Nevertheless, in terms of historic townscape, they are both now examples of places where the whole adds up to less than the sum of the parts. In Royal Tunbridge Wells the reverse is true. Here we are fortunate in having a number of Georgian, and more especially Victorian, buildings which, although sometimes relatively modest in themselves, add up to a historic town of great character, where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. Nowhere is this more true than in the sequence of older buildings facing our commons.

Vale Royal Methodist Church is included in the Local List of Heritage Assets within the Royal Tunbridge Wells and Rusthall Conservation Areas. In our town of Tunbridge Wells, two former Congregational Churches provide commendable examples of adaptation for new uses. One in Mount Pleasant for commercial use, and the other in Albion Road for residential use.
It would be good if that kind of approach could be explored at Vale Royal, where the old schoolroom beneath, might offer scope for the provision of a smaller continuing place of worship, if desired.