Brickendon

Holy Cross & St Alban is a rather successful 1930s designed chapel with a 2002 west end extension which blends in perfectly. A modest building but a nice end to the day.

Neither Pevsner nor Mee cover it but from the guide:

In 1883, parts of the Brickendonbury Estate were sold to a local business man, Mr. Henry Wilson Demain Saunders. He died at an early age in 1888 and his widow, Minnie, remarried Mr. Arthur Henry Kingsley in 1892.

The Chapel was built with funds provided by Mrs. Kingsley during her lifetime, and by her daughter Constance Demain Saunders who was responsible for its completion.

The Demain Saunders family were so impressed with the way in which some friends of theirs had converted an old timbered barn into a Chapel, that they decided to ask the architect W.F. Haslip, who had done the conversion, to design a similar Chapel in Brickendon, which would be in keeping with the surroundings. The timber was cut from trees on the Brickendon estate and lay weathering on the Green for the necessary length of time. Constance Demain Saunders stipulated that for the building of the Chapel, men of Brickendon should be employed by the builders, Rattee and Kett of Cambridge.

Before the building began the field was marked in 1931 by the setting up of a Great Cross of oak, designed by Alexander Nairne, a Canon of Windsor and a close friend of the Demain Saunders family. As 1931 was the Millennium of the Poet Virgil, the words DIVINI GLORIA RURIS (The Glory of the Divine Country), were carved in the Cross. The Cross was dedicated on Palm Sunday of that year.

Flickr.