The Church of St Alban The Martyr,
Charles Street, Oxford : A Brief History

The church of St Alban the Martyr was built for the rapidly expanding Anglo-Catholic parish of Cowley St John, which was set up in 1868 by Father Richard Meux Benson and received its existing parish church of SS Mary and John in 1883. As East Oxford 's residential area developed, the need for another church was strong, particularly in the ‘Robin Hood’ district (between Magdalen Road and Howard Street ). A Mission Room on the corner of Catherine Street and Howard Street , established by Father William Scott (vicar from 1886) and used from 1887 to 1889, was the first step to a new church. A site on the corner of  Catherine Street and Charles Street was purchased, and St Alban's Mission Church , a small brick building designed by A.M.Mowbray for 120 people, was opened on 30 May 1889. Originally the interior was screened across the chancel and doubled up as a boys' junior school on weekdays until the school of SS Mary and John at Hertford Street was completed (1896); a corrugated iron room was added in 1912. The image below shows a view of the church in 1916.

In October 1913, Father Alfred Cecil Scott (who had succeeded his brother as Vicar in 1910) bought an existing chapel and adjoining house at 60 Percy Street for use as a church hall and parsonage. It had been built in 1898 by U.V. Herford, self-styled ‘Bishop of Mercia and Middlesex’ and minister of a congregation that was originally Unitarian. The first resident priest was Father R.G.Millidge. This chapel and house were sold in 1984 and are now a photographic studio and attached residence. St Alban's began to function almost as a separate parish under Father Norman Hayward (1922-1925): it managed its own finances, had an Entertainment Committee and its own Sunday School Outing.

It was his successor, Father Richard Lewis (1926-1929), who raised money for a new church (on the site of the Mission Church ) and commissioned T.Lawrence Dale to design a  building, originally intended for 390 people. Dale, later the author of Towards a Plan For Oxford City (1944), also designed the church of St Michael and All Angels, New Marston (consecrated 1955). 

The foundation stone was laid on St Alban’s Day 1928, and the new St Alban's Church building (originally planned as the north aisle of a much larger building and built by David Fisher, then churchwarden) was consecrated on 1 May 1933.  The angels above the main entrance to the church (above) were carved by local artist John Henry Brookes, later Principal of the Oxford College of Technology, Art and Commerce in Headington, which in 1970 became Oxford Polytechnic and which in 1992 was named Oxford Brookes University after him. Its interior (below) still awaited its principal decoration to add to the painted panels with Crucifixion motifs on the cross-beams (see back cover) – Eric Gill’s Stations of the Cross (installed 1938-45).

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