Meeting House for the Society of Friends at Wanstead by Norman Frith

Manplan 5 was originally published in March 1970, and was republished online in May 2016. Read the full piece on church design here

Many of the ideas discovered by traditional Christianity in recent years are those which have been put into practice by Protestants from the beginning. This Meeting House for the Society of Friends at Wanstead (architect Norman Frith) is a recent version of the sort of thing Quakers have been building since the seventeenth century. In the meeting room itself the members face one another (here on three sides of a triangle). And the social rooms are housed in separate pavilions. The scale is rigorously domestic, the tone scrupulously secular.