This huge church of 1936 will be a familiar sight to anyone driving out of Norwich to the north. It sits four-square at the Mile Cross junction, angled to ensure that it faces towards the east. It replaced a Victorian brick-built church on the same site, and it seems to have gone up fairly quickly - Queen Mary laid the foundation stone just eighteen months before the consecration service. St Catherine is a concrete church, the walls faced in a brick which appears purple on a sunny day. The architects were Caroe and Robinson, and the style is a robust Norman - or, as Pevsner puts it more accurately, the effect is Norman, without any precisely identifiable medieval motifs. The best feature is the west front, unusually without any doors, and the louvred lancets of the bell windows which echo the great Norman churches of Castle Rising and South Lopham. How this church would benefit from a city square to its west!

It is interesting to compare the building with the exact contemporary St Alban, across the city in the southern suburbs. St Alban is the better church I think, but in reality the comparison is a meaningless one, since the architecture and construction are so very different. It seems extraordinary that St Catherine was completed two years before St Alban, and one wonders what Cecil Upcher thought as he looked across the city and saw this great pile rising. Another big difference between that church and this one is that I have never found St Catherine open, which seems a great shame for such a landmark building. Mile Cross is supposedly a rough area - I've not seen evidence of this myself, and in any case surely this church would be fully protected by its exposed setting? How powerful it would be if this part of Norwich could have a space in which residents, pilgrims and strangers could enter a sense of the numinous.