THE room where our main picture was captured hasn’t existed for more than 40 years.

It was in a church mentioned briefly in an edition of Rewind some weeks ago.

St Mary’s, daughter church of Christ Church in Old Town, stood in The Mall.

In 1976, the wooden building was put up for sale at £1,000 to anybody willing to dismantle it and take the parts away.

The site had to be cleared for what is now the Goddard House sheltered housing complex - and the brick-built modern St Mary’s which continues to thrive.

Our photograph first appeared in 1969 in a booklet called The Old Town Parish Church. The original caption explains that St Mary’s “...caters for residents in the western part of the parish. There is no hall, so Sunday School must be held in the church.”

Do any readers recognise the teacher or children?

In an introduction to the booklet the Vicar, Derek Palmer, thanks parishioners Rosemary Stephens and Dennis Bird for putting it together.

It was priced at half a crown, the equivalent of 12.5 decimal pence, and its 28 pages detail the history not just of Christ Church and St Mary’s Church but of a parish which at the time dated back some 800 years.

The list of 36 vicars dates back to 1301, when Richard de Haghemaz took up his appointment in a location mentioned in the Domesday Book 215 years earlier.

A section devoted to St Mary’s says that in 1923 the then Vicar, Canon Charles Mayall, was concerned about the best way of ministering to the population of the growing western side of the parish.

The local squire, Major Goddard, shared those concerns, and in 1925 offered a site roughly half way along The Mall, along with £100 toward what turned out to be building and equipment costs of £1,200. Fundraising duly began, and the church was completed by the end of the year.

The bishop who dedicated St Mary’s is not named, but if convention was followed the ceremony would have been performed by the Bishop of Bristol, George Nickson.

“The following Sunday,” according to the booklet written 43 years later, “there were sixty-six communicants at 8am and the church was full for Matins and Evensong.

“More than fifty children were enrolled at the Children’s Service in the afternoon.

“The spare ground round the church was let out for members to use as allotments.

“In 1959 the Church Commissioners built two bungalows there, facing The Mall, for the use of retired clergy from Bristol Diocese.”