With Peter Hughes on Saturday 16 September you can enjoy three extraordinarily different Victorian Gothic churches in West Oxfordshire.  St Mary’s Freeland (1866-71) is an extravaganza of high church decoration orchestrated by J L Pearson (who also designed St.Augustine, Kilburn, and Truro Cathedral). The mural decoration and stained glass are by the well-known firm of Clayton and Bell. (The depiction of the Flight into Egypt featured on our Christmas card in 2015). We then go on to the exactly contemporary but very different St Michael’s in Leafield (1860-74) by Sir George Gilbert Scott. This is large and austere and relies for its impact on architectural form, not surface decoration. Finally after a pub lunch  we visit the very peculiar but again contemporary St John the Evangelist in Hailey, designed by Clapton Crabbe Rolfe, the 21-year old son of the vicar. It was described at the time by the diocesan architect, G.E. Street, as ‘needlessly eccentric’, and in her Guide to the Churches of Oxfordshire Jennifer Sherwood describes it as undigested High Victorian brutalism. All this at a cost of £20 (to include pub lunch but not drinks)