All Saints Westboro Ottawa

There could be no more appropriate image to illustrate church architecture in the Diocese of Ottawa in the 1950s than this one.  If the house of worship we see here seems both huge and unfamiliar that is probably because of the unusual angle from which the professional photographer has taken this photograph.  

This is what books on architecture describe as a worm’s eye view of a building, meaning literally a view taken from the level that a worm inching its way along the floor could expect to see things. Hence we can readily see the seam in the battleship linoleum. We leave to another day any discussion as to whether or not worms are interested in architecture.

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Ostensibly, what we see here is a photograph of a wedding taking place in the new All Saints Church, Westboro soon after that parish built a large new house of worship in 1953.  Up until 1950, everyone referred to this parish as All Saints, Nepean.  But once Westboro was expropriated that year by an expanding City of Ottawa, it became necessary to refer to All Saints (Westboro) in Ottawa, as opposed to All Saints (Sandy Hill) which up until that time had been the only church of that name in the city of Ottawa proper.

All Saints (Westboro) was one of a dozen large new churches built in suburban Ottawa-Carleton in the generation from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.  The perspective from a worm’s eye view can sometimes be distorted, and so it appears to be the case here, as the triangles of the beams in the ceiling appear somewhat flatter than the equilateral triangles that were planned to represent the Trinity.

This photograph was taken amid a baby boom, with the wedding shown here promising to add to the record numbers of births taking place in this generation. This bold and dramatic photograph, if intended to document a particular marriage, appears also to have been used in a professional brochure used to raise funds to pay for this large new house of worship.

Ninety years after Thomas Fuller designed the first All Saints, Nepean, the Gothic Revival had gone from strength to strength. Much of this large church was illusory, with stones in the exterior drawn in concrete, the stone arches of the chancel arch and the chancel window we see here simply being trompe l’oeil effect done in plaster, and the ceiling beams simply being a wood veneer to mask the structural iron I-beams beneath.  The stained glass in the chancel window was real enough, manufactured by Leonard Pike at Colonial Art Glass.  Although the liturgical layout was designed to accommodate the high church liturgy of traditional Anglican worship, the design of the pew ends indicated that modern ideas were on the way.  

There are various indicators of just when this was. The Union Jack at the front reminds us it was some time before a distinctive Canadian flag appeared. The Saint George’s flag reminds us that this photograph is documenting a parish of the Church of England in Canada, at a time when the ranks of Anglicans in the Diocese of Ottawa were being added to by a huge postwar immigration from England. The Anglican Church of Canada with its own flag was still a few years off.  That every woman visible in the congregation was wearing a hat is a further reminder that even the recent “past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”     

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