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St. Margaret’s Mission
Church |
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 The first church in South
Wonston was one of the earliest buildings in the village, a
corrugated iron mission hut erected in 1909. The village was
part of the parish of Wonston, and its Rector, the Revd. R. F.
Bigg-Wither, personally paid £8 for a plot of land on which to build
the church.
His curate (the Revd. Charles H.
Roberts) placed an order with Humphreys Ltd of Knightsbridge, a
company that specialised in supplying corrugated iron buildings
ready to assemble. The mission room was to be timber-framed,
clad with galvanised corrugated iron, and measuring 25’ by
15’. The interior was to be clad with pine panelling; there
would be a porch at the western end, a bell hung externally at the
eastern end and a small vestry area added on the southern side. The
building was bought from donations for £89 10s, and the foundations
were laid at a cost of £13 by Joseph Groves, a local carpenter and
builder, whose eldest child became the first person to be baptised
in the mission church.
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 The church was first used
on Sunday 7th February 1909, and was formally licensed for divine
service as a daughter church by the Bishop of Winchester on 20th
December 1909. Baptisms could be performed there and recorded
in the Wonston baptism register, but marriages and funerals would
take place at the parish church in Wonston. |
 While most
of the fittings were bought or donated, the stone font was actually
‘the ancient one of the parish’, possibly around 400 years
old. It had been discovered under the floorboards of the
parish church in Wonston, after a serious fire there just a few
months before the mission church was opened. It is believed to have
been deliberately buried there in 1871, when a new font had been
presented to the parish church. |
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By 1918 the village was growing but still very
small, and the residents must have been devastated when nine of
their young men were killed in the 1st World War, two of them from
the same family. The villagers clubbed together to commission a
marble memorial plaque to hang in the church, and later a second
memorial commemorated a further four men who died in the 2nd World
War
After the arrival of electricity and mains water in
the 1950s, proper road surfacing and mains sewerage in the 60s,
South Wonston began to expand rapidly. By the mid 1980s, the mission
church had become much too small for the size of the congregations,
and some services were regularly held next door in the Village
Hall.
 The last ‘amen’ was said in the mission church on 29th
September 1996, after which all services transferred to the new
church of St. Margaret’s, purpose-built as a shared facility with
the local school. For a time the old building was let as a workshop,
but its condition was deteriorating and so in 2006 it was moved to a
new home. A final farewell service was held on 4th June 2006, the
day before it was carefully dismantled piece by piece and taken to
the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, near Chichester, for
restoration and public display.
In December 2009, to mark the
end of the centenary year, an Incumbents' Board was unveiled,
showing the names of all the rectors and assistant clergy who have
ministered to South Wonston throughout its history.
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