List of places of worship on the Isle of Wight
A wide range of Christian denominations are represented, and Muslims have a mosque in the island's main town of Newport.
Many of the island's churches and chapels are in the ancient ports of Yarmouth and Newport, the Victorian seaside resorts of Ryde, Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, and the twin towns of Cowes and East Cowes; but even the smallest villages often have their own Anglican parish churches and sometimes a Nonconformist chapel.
Upper Ryde, its inland neighbour, was connected to it in 1780, and rapid development ensued through the Regency and early Victorian eras.
[7] Newport, the county town, is slightly smaller (population 17,200)[6] but much older: founded c. 1180 as a "new port" for the island, centrally located on the River Medina, it retains its medieval grid pattern of streets (although the oldest surviving buildings are 17th-century).
[6] Ventnor (population 6,000)[6] was already more developed by the time the railway arrived in 1866: early 19th-century visitors discovered the village's dramatic setting, and formal urban planning began in the 1830s.
[13] Of the churches established in the Saxon era, only fragments remain:[note 2] Arreton and Freshwater both retain structural features from that period.
[18] Monuments to prominent island families such as the Oglander and Worsley baronets and the Leighs of Godshill are another important feature of this era.
New churches replaced smaller medieval buildings at St Lawrence (1878, by George Gilbert Scott) and Bonchurch (by Benjamin Ferrey, 1847–48)[21] and the ruined chapel in the hamlet of Newtown (1835, by local architect A. F.
[23] Many Anglican churches on the island were either built or reconstructed in the 1850s or 1860s, mostly in a range of Gothic Revival styles—some with distinctive features such as the tower at Whippingham, the tall spire at Holy Trinity, Ventnor and the interior of St Mary's, Cowes, where a new church with a complex polychrome brickwork interior was grafted on to the "remarkable" tower designed by John Nash.
[24] Thomas Hellyer of Ryde, described by Nikolaus Pevsner as a "very individualistic"[25] and "remarkable" architect,[26] was responsible for several churches in this era—both new buildings (at Bembridge, Havenstreet, Oakfield, Seaview, St Saviour's at Shanklin and the now closed Holy Trinity at Ryde) and rebuilding work (at Binstead and East Cowes).
[35] Similarly St Saviour's Church at Totland (1923) succeeds a private chapel which had opened in 1871 in the nearby manor house.
[36] The chapel at St Dominic's Priory at Carisbrooke and a now vanished tin tabernacle at Appuldurcombe House were also used for public worship in the early 20th century and before,[37] and chapels at Quarr Abbey at Binstead and St Cecilia's Abbey at Ryde are still registered for public worship.
[43] Many old chapels built by the Bible Christians survive, for example at Brading (where Toms herself founded a "preaching house" in 1837),[42] Rookley (1859), Arreton (1866)[44] and Newport (1879–80).
[50] New Methodist chapels were built throughout the 20th century, for example in Lake (a "stylish, typically late 1950s" building) and Brighstone (1999), and in 2014 a new church opened at Freshwater to serve that village and nearby Totland.
Several congregations have a long unbroken history of worship: the three surviving rural chapels date from 1805 (Wellow), 1836 (Freshwater) and 1849 (Niton), and Castlehold Baptist Church at Newport was built in 1812.
The Castlehold congregation seceded from the town's original Baptist chapel, which later developed a Unitarian character which it still holds.
Pentecostal churches of various types can be found in Newport, Ryde and Sandown; Spiritualists worship in Cowes (where a congregation has met since the 1930s), Ryde and Ventnor; Quakers, the Salvation Army and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have premises in Newport; and there are four Kingdom Halls of Jehovah's Witnesses.
[52] Limestone was quarried extensively from the Bembridge Beds off the island's east coast, and from deposits around Ryde, Binstead and Gurnard, from Saxon times until the Victorian era.
A harder, more durable but scarcer variety ("Quarr stone") was used in the island's Saxon churches, and evidence of this survives at Freshwater and Arreton.
More common within these quarries was the less solid "Binstead stone", which occurs in many churches on the island and was still used around Ryde during the town's Victorian expansion.
Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism had a much lower following on the island than in the country overall: in 2011, 5.02% of people in England were Muslim, 1.52% were Hindu, 0.79% were Sikh, 0.49% were Jewish and 0.45% were Buddhist.
