St Michael’s Spiritualist Church and Sanctuary
Formerly The Malt House

This text is taken from a leaflet produced for one of the Ewell Open Days.
Author not known.

St Michael’s Spiritualist Church and Sanctuary,
Church Road, Ewell (July 2013)
Image by Hassocks5489, (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons

The building was purchased by Miss Margaret Glyn to become her music room, housing a valuable collection of antique musical instruments amassed by her and her brothers Arthur and Gervis. From 1922 until the early 1950s it was the venue for regular music soirees, many of the concerts featuring well-known artists.

Collection of musical instruments in The Malt House, October 1937
Image by Bernard Alfier Ltd
Image courtesy of E&EL&FHC

Above the bookcase in the meeting room is a carved oak plaque with the date 1922, commemorating the opening as music rooms. The music room had until then occupied the building to the left in the Rectory (Glyn House) grounds. To the right and above the entrance door of the church is the Glyn coat of arms carved for the present Rectory completed in 1838 and moved here after the death of Sir Gervas Glyn, when the entrance to Glyn House was reconstructed on the present frontage and the new coat of arms carved in brick.

Built into the path approaching the Church from the street is a mill stone, reputedly from the Ewell powder mill, which ceased to function in 1875.

St Michael’s Spiritualist Church and Sanctuary,
Church Road, Ewell (July 2013)
Image by Hassocks5489, (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons

The Church of St Michael inaugurated in the mid-1950s, occupies a site which until the early 1900s had operated as a malting house recorded from around the middle of the 17th century. For a short while the predecessor building housed The George public house during the latter part of the 18th century and the first few years of the 19th.

The old wooden building was purchased around 1820 by the Stone family, maltsters, corn and seed chandlers, re-built in brick and the present forward section of the building constructed. It operated in its traditional malt house role for almost a century, the latter few years as storage for grain and seed merchandising. The main part of the building incorporates oak panelling from a later source.

Memorial Plaque

As shown below, the building has a Borough plaque erected during the 2005 creation of the Ewell Heritage Trail, in which this comes as Location 30 in Part 3. The wording is “ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH: A music room for the Glyns, this building was previously a malthouse, rebuilt c. 1820″.

St Michael’s the Sanctuary.
Photographs by Roger Morgan © 2023