← Places in Oakhaven

Parish church

St Cuthbert’s

Kimberton Road, Radworth

Rows of red-brick terraces with grey slate roofs seen from above, and on the skyline the tower and spire of St Cuthbert's beside the taller incinerator chimney.

Eighteen sixty-eight, Gothic Revival, and older than every house around it: the estate grew up round the church rather than the other way about. Thirty metres of nave under a steep slate roof, pointed-arch windows down both sides, one big east window over the altar, and a square west tower seventeen metres to its battlements, with a stone spire rising out of the middle of them to thirty-one.

It was built for a congregation the size the parish expected rather than the one it got, which is why it feels large. Twenty-four pews in two banks either side of the aisle, choir stalls facing each other, an organ with its pipes stepped up the north wall, a raised octagonal pulpit and a brass eagle lectern at the chancel step, a stone font by the west door and a hymn board. The light comes from five warm pendants, and on the wall there is a memorial tablet whose face has been left blank.

It rings the hour from seven in the morning until ten at night, counting the hour out properly, one to twelve, and then it is silent until seven again. The bells carry well over a kilometre across the terraces, duller the further off you are, and anybody who has lived near a church will tell you these strike a shade quicker than they should. If you are out on the estate at three in the morning, the quiet is the church’s doing.

From the top of the estate you can see the spire on the skyline, and beside it, out past the ring road, the incinerator chimney at eighty-two metres, more than twice its height. The parish and the council, side by side, each pointing at the sky as though it had the better claim.

The doors are open from eight in the morning until six at night. Martin, the vicar, is about during the day: thirty-eight, bearded, a black field jacket over his clerical shirt and a white tab collar, and a good deal less forbidding than his building.

The bells are real tower bells (recordings by klankbeeld on Freesound, CC BY), struck from the belfry so they carry across the estate and fade with distance the way a parish church’s do. It is one of the small things that make this a game set in the UK rather than a game set anywhere.

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