| Description | The parish of St John the Evangelist began as a Mission of the church of Our Lady Help of Christians, Rickmansworth. The parish of Rickmansworth was founded in 1886 by the Rev. Henry Hardy, a secular priest who acted as Rector until 1904 when he handed the running of the Mission over to the Augustinians of the Assumption. Fr Henri Julien (1872-1958) took charge together with a curate and a lay brother, and formal boundaries of the parish of Rickmansworth were established by the Diocese in 1906. The Assumptionists ran the parish for 75 years, opening three chapels of ease in the area between 1958 and 1974, which later became the centres of the present parishes of Croxley Green, Chorleywood and Mill End.
Catholics in Mill End and Maple Cross formed part of the Rickmansworth parish until after the Second World War when the population in the area rapidly expanded. During the 1950s, Mass was celebrated at the 'Camp', an old wartime Nissen hut in Denham Way. In 1961, the Ebenezer Chapel in the Uxbridge Road was acquired from the Baptists to accommodate the burgeoning Catholic population. This was demolished in 1964 in preparation for a road widening scheme, so the congregation moved to the Girl Guides' Hut in Springwell Avenue. In 1950 the Assumptionists had bought a site in Berry Lane for a new Catholic primary school to replace the existing free school of St Monica's run by the Daughters of Jesus. St John's Primary School duly opened in 1965 and from 1967 Mass was held in the school hall until a permanent church was finally built.
In 1967 Fr Philip Lemmon became Rector of Our Lady Help of Christians and it was he who provided the final impetus in the long process to build a permanent church in Mill End. Work finally began in 1970 and on 27 June 1971, Cardinal Heenan came to formally open the new chuch of St John the Evangelist at Mill End, which took its dedication from the primary school next door. The church was designed to double as a social centre, with a partition to pull across the front of the Sanctuary to isolate the Blessed Sacrament. St John's continued to be served by the Assumptionists from Rickmansowrth under Fr Lemmon and later Fr John Spencer, until the summer of 1974 when the Diocese designated St John the Evangelist, Mill End as a parish in its own right. Fr Tom Gardner became St John's first Diocesan priest, and acquired his own presbytery in Church Lane in 1975. In the late 1980s, another presbytery was built by Fr Wardle in the church grounds.
After Chorleywood became a parish in its own right in 1963, consideration was given as to whether Maple Cross could also exist as a separate parish too, but parishioners preferred to worship at Our Lady Help of Christians, and in time their numbers dwindled so that the area remained served by the church at Mill End. |