New St Stephen the Great website

St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust, owners of the former SPCK bookshops have a new website.

I was interested to note the following sentence on one of the pages:

In the ensuing 3 years, the Trust has acquired redundant churches in Dorset, West Yorkshire, County Durham, Suffolk, Norfolk and West Sussex. It has succeeded in putting these into use as Orthodox Christian Churches or is in the process of doing so. At least three of these buildings were due to be knocked down while a fourth was to be turned over to a wholly secular use.

So, which are these redundant churches?

• Dorset: St. Osmunds, Parkstone, Poole (early 2005)
• West Yorkshire: Saint Mary Magdalene in Manningham, Bradford (May 2007)
• County Durham: St Cuthberts, Gateshead? (Is this the church in the video? The 1845 date fits and it looks like it. Gateshead isn't in County Durham though.)
• Suffolk ?
• Norfolk ?
• West Sussex ?

I have no idea about the Suffolk church. Any ideas? As for Norfolk and West Sussex - are these last two the SPCK shops in Norwich and Chichester? Does this mean that the Trust has plans to turn all of the former SPCK shops that are in church buildings back into churches?

The new website allows comments and Mark Brewer says 'Please feel free to contact me at your convenience', so perhaps someone would like to ask.

In other related news:
• The comment thread on the SSGCT video is still very active. Users SSGCT and warriort38 are continuing to respond to comments made.
• One poster commenting in support of the video is 'edolhausen'. I wonder if that poster is any relation to Ed Olhausen, Supply Chain Director of St Andrews Christian Bookshops.
• In the Guardian Stephen Bates has mentioned the former SPCK bookshops. The paragraph looks as if it is based on the Bookseller piece I linked to a week or so ago 'More resignations at SPCK'.