The architectural claims of the building are modest; its primary significance lies in its status as the national shrine of St Boniface, Anglo-Saxon missionary to Germany and the patron of the Diocese of Plymouth, who was born in Crediton. The church contains some furnishings of note. 

From early in the twentieth century Catholics in Crediton worshipped in a small chapel on Bowden Hill. In 1966 a site for a new church was purchased. The church building also included a shrine to St Boniface, who was born in Crediton in about 680AD.  Boniface left England in 718 AD and spent the rest of his life as a missionary in Germany, where he died and was buried at the Abbey of Fulda, which he had founded. The foundation stone of the new church at Crediton, placed at the entrance to the building, was brought from the tomb of the saint in the basilica at Fulda.

Description

The church consists of two rectangular top-lit enclosures, the larger containing the church, the smaller containing a meeting room; these two main spaces are linked by an entrance hall, at the back of which is the shrine of St Boniface. The windowless external walls of the building are of red brick laid in stretcher bond, with timber clerestories and shallow pitched metal-covered roofs over both church and hall. The hall roof is topped by a tall fibreglass fleche.

The interior is open, with seating on three sides. The furniture was designed by the architects. Furnishings include a relief of St Boniface and a figure of the Virgin and Child, both by Kenneth Carter, Head of the Sculpture Department at Exeter College of Art, mosaic Stations of the Cross by Arthur Goodwin, Head of the Fine Art department at the same college and some semi-abstract glass by Fr Charles Norris of Buckfast Abbey.

Heritage Details