List of places of worship in Crawley
The borough of Crawley, in West Sussex, England, has 43 churches, chapels and other buildings used specifically for worship. Other religious communities meet in community centres, schools and other buildings whose primary function is secular. Three other former places of worship are no longer used by their original congregation, although only one of these has fallen out of use entirely. The borough covers the New Town of Crawley, whose development began in the late 1940s, and Gatwick Airport—an international airport which has two multi-faith chapels of its own. The New Town absorbed three villages with a long history of Christian worship, and later extensions to the boundary have brought other churches into the borough.
Crawley has a majority Christian population, but it has a much larger proportion of Muslim and Hindu residents than England overall. There are two Hindu temples and a Hindu centre, a Sikh gurdwara and three mosques. A Quaker meeting house in the Ifield area is one of the oldest in the world.
Several churches have listed status in view of their architectural and historical importance, but most places of worship date from the postwar era when the New Town was developed, and are of modest architectural merit: Nikolaus Pevsner stated in 1965 that those built up to that time were "either entirely uneventful or more often mannered and contorted, with odd spikes and curvy roofs".
History and development
Most of the borough's area is covered by Crawley New Town. The area around the villages of Three Bridges, Crawley and Ifield was selected by the British Government as the site for one of the developments proposed in the New Towns Act 1946. The Government set up a Development Corporation, headed by Sir Thomas Bennett, to coordinate the work. Anthony Minoprio designed the plans, and building work started in the late 1940s and continued until the late 1980s. The New Town consisted of self-contained neighbourhoods, each of which had at least one Anglican church. The Development Corporation's intention was for one to be placed at the centre of each neighbourhood, and for churches of other Christian denominations to occupy sites where they could serve a larger area covering several neighbourhoods. This plan was followed as far as practicable. The Corporation provided the freehold of the land on which churches were built at 25% of the price that applied for residential land use.Two mosques were established in the town in the mid-1980s, and the Ahmadiyya community founded a third in the former Elim Pentecostal church in Langley Green in 2012. A Gurjar Hindu community became established in Crawley in 1968 and opened a mandir and community centre in a building in West Green in 1998. A new temple in the Ifield area was expected to open in December 2009, but construction was delayed and it opened on 23 May 2010. It is the largest such temple in South East England, at, and also has a community centre, offices, gardens and sports facilities. There is no synagogue in Crawley, although a small Jewish community—followers of the Liberal Judaism—meet regularly. Planning permission for a synagogue had been granted in 1964, but it was never built. There is a small Sikh gurdwara in West Green; in January 2009 planning permission was granted for its demolition and replacement with a larger two-storey structure, but as of no work has started.
The old villages of Three Bridges, Crawley and Ifield lay within the ancient parishes of Crawley and Ifield. Both of their 13th-century parish churches are still used for Anglican worship. Expansion of the borough's boundary has brought more churches into Crawley, including the early 11th-century church at Worth—formerly an isolated Wealden village at the centre of its own large parish. Ifield was a centre of Nonconformism in the 17th century: its Friends Meeting House was built in 1676, when more than 25% of the village's residents were Dissenters.
Listed status
has awarded listed status to seven church buildings in the district. A building is defined as "listed" when it is placed on a statutory register of buildings of "special architectural or historic interest" in accordance with the Planning Act 1990. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, a Government department, is responsible for this; English Heritage, a non-departmental public body, acts as an agency of the department to administer the process and advise the department on relevant issues. There are three grades of listing status. Grade I, the highest, is defined as being of "exceptional interest"; Grade II* is used for "particularly important buildings of more than special interest"; and Grade II, the lowest, is used for buildings of "special interest". As of February 2001, there were three Grade I-listed buildings, 12 with Grade II* status and 80 Grade II-listed buildings in the borough of Crawley. Additionally, Crawley Borough Council grants locally listed building status to buildings which have historical or architectural interest at a local level, but which are not of sufficient quality to merit listing at a national level. As of November 2010, five churches in the borough were on the local list.| Grade | Criteria |
| Grade I | Buildings of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important. |
| Grade II* | Particularly important buildings of more than special interest. |
| Grade II | Buildings of national importance and special interest. |
| Locally listed | Buildings considered by the Council to be "an important part of heritage due to architectural, historic or archaeological significance". |