Visiting St John’s church, Stoneleigh

It’s not often that a modern church can be said to have been built at the same time as a purpose-built town, but that happened in the 1930s on London’s borders.Stoneleigh is a town that straddles the railway and can date its existence to 1860s when John Jeffries Stone bought about 1,100 acres of fields and woods in the area. Oddly, when he died in 1879, his will required that the land be sold for housing, but it seems his inheritors preferred the fields as they managed to hold off an