History and Development
Most of the borough's 44.97 km2 (17.36 sq mi) 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 (temple) 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 230 m2 (2,500 sq ft), and also has a 1,216 m2 (13,090 sq ft) community centre, offices, gardens and sports facilities. There is no synagogue in Crawley, although a small Jewish community—followers of the Liberal form of Progressive 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 2013 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.
Read more about this topic: List Of Places Of Worship In Crawley
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