About: Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley

The Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony is a Roman Catholic church in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. The town's first permanent place of Roman Catholic worship was founded in 1861 next to a friary whose members, from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, had been invited to the area by a wealthy local family of Catholic converts. Crawley's transformation from a modest market town to a rapidly growing postwar New Town in the mid-20th century made a larger church necessary, and in the late 1950s the ecclesiastical architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was commissioned to build a new church. The friary closed in 1980 and has been demolished, but the large brick church still stands in a commanding position facing the town centre. English Heritage has listed the buil