St Michael & All Angels Church is on
the western side of Roding Road, opposite Stonards Hill. By the 1930s
this area east of the railway was being developed rapidly, so in 1937
St Mary's provided a church hall on the present site in Roding
Road, at first primarily as a Sunday school and then for general
worship. In 1944 the hall was dedicated as St Michael's Church
within St Mary's parish, and in 1995 it gained its own parish.
The Jubilee Hall was added in 2002.
St Nicholas' Church lies on the western side
of Rectory Lane, just above the Borders Lane junction. The original
parish church for Loughton was built here some years before 1177, to
serve the adjoining Loughton Hall. It consisted of a nave, chancel,
north aisle, south porch and a weather-boarded tower with shingled spire.
In 1737, the tower and spire were repaired and general repairs were made in
the 1820s. In 1836, the old Loughton Hall was demolished.
The church had already become isolated and it was
now even more so, and in 1846 was replaced by St John's. St Nicholas
was demolished but the chancel remained, to be turned into a mortuary
chapel. Within thirty years, it was decided to build another church on
the site of the old. In 1877, what was left of the old church was
demolished and a replacement St Nicholas was built a few yards to
the west, in a similar style to the old, of which some relics can be
seen in the grass.
Debden Christian Spiritualist Church meets
in this modern building on the southern side of Border's Lane, just
east of the Colson Lane junction. The Congregationalists who had been
worshipping at Loughton Union Church built their own church here in 1953,
although the exact site is uncertain. It opened as Debden
Congregational Church (United Reformed from 1972), but closed at
an unknown later date, probably the reason the site was available
for this hall.
Loughton Chigwell & District Synagogue
lies behind these black iron gates on the Northern side of
Border's Lane, opposite Deepdene Road and approximately two hundred
metres west of the site of the former Congregationalist church. The
synagogue was founded before 1955, but perhaps not long before, to
judge from the style of the building. The congregation is Ashkenazi
Orthodox, and is affiliated to the Federation of Synagogues.
Trinity Church stands at the top of the
hill on the western side of Mannock Drive, close to the Thatcher's
Close turning. It is a Methodist church building with a joint Anglican/
Methodist congregation, erected to serve the housing estate which
forms the eastern edges of Debden, which itself is little more than
a suburb on the eastern side of Loughton. A date of construction for
the church cannot be ascertained, but something between 1960-1980
would probably be appropriate.
