Latest news
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Palm Sunday - 5 April 2020, 10am
Live Stream Eucharist As St Mary's is closed, Fr Andrew will be celebrating the Eucharist with the liturgy for Palm Sunday at the vicarage instead at our normal Sunday worship time of 10am. If you would like to join the service, please click on the link below at 9.55am for the live stream: meet.google.com/xvc-mjjz-ggw You may also follow by phone, in which case call 020 3937 1525 shortly before 10am and key in this number when prompted: 703 955 345# Or you may simply prefer to read the readings and remember each other and the needs of the world in prayer at 10am. Please help our Big Issue Vendors
Since June 2017, St Mary's has been the local distribution agency for the Big Issue magazine - a quietly amazing venture that provides income, incentive, structure, routine and companionship to insecurely-housed men and women. At St Mary's alone, we have almost 30 vendors on our books, all of whom we know and engage with regularly and whose resilience and hope in the face of hardship is often humbling. Now, because of coronavirus, they can no longer sell the magazine on the streets, and the very future of the magazine is imperilled by the lack of sales. Please help avert this crisis by signing up for a 3, 6 or 12 month subscription to have the magazine delivered to your door. Just as with the street sales, half of the subscription money will go to the vendors. We sell about 600 copies of the Big Issue in Brighton each week, so that's 600 subscribers we need to keep our Brighton vendors going. Please sign up now! Only £32.50 for 13 issues - and it's always a fabulous read! Coronavirus Update - 23 March 2020
It is with great sadness that we have taken the decision to close both the church and church hall and suspend all worship and outreach activities in them for the foreseeable future. Our worship of God and our care for each other continue, but cannot safely be done in our buildings in the present circumstances. If you would like a prayer said for yourself or others, please use our confidential Can we pray for you? link. Please see too the suggested prayers and liturgy for worship at home on the Church of England website. To protect the vulnerable among us, please do not leave your home except for essential trips. If you live at a distance from elderly or vulnerable friends or family who reside in our neighbourhood, or are yourself required to self-isolate, please let us know if they need any assistance in obtaining supplies or other support and we will try to help. Phone: 01273 698601 Spring 2020 e-newsletter out now.
Our Spring e-newsletter is out now, with news of forthcoming services, music and other events. If you'd like to receive a copy of this regularly, please send your email address to info@stmaryschurchbrighton.org.uk and we'll add you to the mailing list. We won't pester you with anything else, we promise. Click here to read the Spring 2020 edition Click here to catch up on the Autumn 2019 edition A Facelift for the Transept Windows
Some 65 years since they were unceremoniously shaved off, the lower transept windows on the west side of the church have their 'eyebrows' (aka hood mouldings) back again. We couldn't be more pleased with the effect! It lifts the whole appearance of the elevation and gives much better definition to the windows, as well as protecting them from the rain. Huge thanks to the Friends of St Mary's for fundraising help to pay for this finishing touch to the repair of this elevation, and also to our long-term funders, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the National Churches Trust, the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Sussex Historic Churches Trust and the Wolfson Foundation. Thank you too to our architects at Thomas Ford & Partners and the masons from Stone Edge who've done such a lovely job of reinstating the mouldings. The older pictures below show the west elevation in 1954 before the Town Corporation re-modelled the garden; in 1955 after the garden's modernisation (by which time the windows' eyebrows had been shaved off) and the sorry state of things as we were beginning the repairs in May 2016. Fine Music for Free
Summer Recital Series 2020 We're delighted to announce the full list of our Fine Music for Free recital series, which commences on Saturday, 4 April, at 6pm with a concert by fine young cellist Alice Ferrarese. Please see our dedicated recitals page for details of all the concerts in the series - and please mark the dates in your calendar! Many of our performers are young talents, setting out on their professional careers, who really appreciate recital experience. It's a great experience for them to have a warm, supportive audience in a big venue like St Mary's. 
Holy Week and Easter Services
Please see our Easter Services page for details of all our events during Holy Week and at Easter 2020. 
Foundation Grant from National Churches Trust
Once again, we have the happy obligation of thanking the National Churches Trust - this time for a Foundation Grant of almost £6,000 to help us remove asbestos from our old boiler crypt. This will allow us to access electrics currently out of bounds and also to repurpose the space as a tool store for our proposed community garden. We hope to complete the work by May 2020. Since 2016, the National Churches Trust has awarded St Mary's over £60,000 to help with repairs and improvements. We are so grateful for this support. It's not just the money - though that helps, obviously! - but the Trust's repeated endorsement of our mission to save St Mary's as a living church and make it into a real community asset is a massive boost to our morale. Thank you to everyone at the Trust and to all who donate to its work. We really appreciate it! 
New free ART WORKS group at St Mary's
Would you like to explore your artistic potential? Find out if you could actually draw a passable cat? If so, come along to our small, friendly Art Works group at St Mary's on Saturday mornings at 11am. It's free and tuition and materials are provided for you, along with tea & coffee. 
Richard Stephenson (1946 - 2019)
Thank you to everyone who donated in memory of our dear friend, Richard Stephenson, who died on Saturday, 2nd November 2019. Along with many other things, Richard was the Treasurer at St Mary's, but most people knew him chiefly as a friendly, welcoming presence who greeted people on a Sunday morning, looked after the Big Issue sales, and ran Kemp Town Talks, his free English-conversation classes. The 'For Richard' campaign on our JustGiving page and other donations raised £3,300, which we have shared equally between the St Mary's Piano Appeal, a cause dear to Richard's heart, and the Martlets Hospice in Hove, whose nurses so beautifully cared for Richard in the final days of his life. 
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View of St Mary's interior, taken from scaffolding erected to repair the clerestory windows in the nave gable, April 2015.
The font and Paschal candle. Photo Jean-Luc Brouard.
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