Church of the Good Shepherd

The Church of the Good Shepherd, Shoreham Beach may be some 800 years newer than the three Norman Churches in Shoreham but its history, whilst shorter, is no less colourful. Following a Beach Mission in 1912, it was decided to build a church in what was then commonly called "Bungalow Town". By February 1913 the site was selected and the plans drawn. Five months later the Church was built and, on 16 July 1913, it was dedicated by the Rt. Revd Charles Ridgeway, the Bishop of Chichester. Almost side by side, in 1914 the Sunny South Film Company started making films on Shoreham Beach. In 1915 Lyndhurst (without his initial collaborators) relocated from the Fort to a site in Kings Gap, just a few metres north-west of the Church of the Good Shepherd. With an £10,00 investment he launched Sealight Film Company and built the glasshouse studio (above). Financial and personal difficulties led to him defaulting on his mortgage, and in 1916 he sold out to the Olympic Kine Trading Company having only made one film. The studios lay dormant until 1919 when the Manchester based Progress Film Company began production under the helm of Sidney Morgan. Over the next three years Progress made more than 20 films, at least 15 at Shoreham, many starring his daughter Joan Morgan. They also developed the site, making Shoreham one of the first studio complexes in Britain with people actors and crew living and working on site. Of their films A Lowland Cinderella (1921) survives in full and fragments remain of their literary adaptations of Mayor of Casterbridge (1921) and Little Dorrit (1920) – the hunt is still on the find the rest! Fire destroyed many of the studio buildings (but not the glasshouse) in 1922 and Progress decided not to return in 1923.

In 1923 film producer Walter West shot two films at Shoreham starring the Vitagraph Girl, Florence Turner. And thus ended Shoreham’s place within the British silent film industry.

At the outbreak of the Second World War much of Bungalow Town was demolished to deter enemy invasion, the Glasshouse survived until 1963. The history of the studios is commemorated in the church by a BFI plaque mounted in 1996 as part of the 100 years of cinema celebrations and an information board.

1922: Bungalow Town on fire newsreel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RT-gC5r8Ks