Anyone in East Grinstead hoping their home might one day shed its reputation as Britain’s strangest town must be feeling glum today. It’s just been reported that Tom Cruise is moving into nearby Saint Hill Manor, the UK headquarters of the Church of Scientology. Cruise, with his fame, good looks and massive swinging bags of money can do a lot of things for a town. But making it more normal is not among them.
If reports in the Daily Mail are to be believed (and why not?) the sofa-bouncer has already started to increase the strange. £16m-worth of renovations are said to have been carried out at the manor – to which “only silver vans with blacked-out windows” are allowed access – and now the plan is to make the UK church as influential as the British royal family. “It might sound like a deluded dream,” a source told the Mail, “but with bottomless cash and ongoing renovations they believe that, in time, Saint Hill Manor will overshadow Buckingham Palace.”
At the very least, Saint Hill will give the palace a run for its money when it comes to unusual behaviour. They might not have centuries of royal intrigue behind them, but they do have the sheer raging oddness of Scientology.
A quick recap for those who haven’t yet seen the infamous Trapped in the Closet episode of South Park: Scientology is a belief system started by the science fiction writer (and former inhabitant of Saint Hill Manor), L Ron Hubbard. Hubbard created a foundation story about strange events 75m years ago when Earth (then called Teegeeack) was part of a confederation of 90 planets under the leadership of a tyrannical ruler named Xenu. Xenu cured intergalactic overpopulation by paralysing the people of the other planets, flying them to Earth in space planes, plopping them down near volcanoes and dropping H-bombs on them. The souls of these murdered people (more accurately the “thetans”) were then taken to cinemas and shown films for several weeks. The end result was that the souls clustered together and now inhabit people in their thousands. These thetans have to be removed – which is where the current church, with its emphasis on “going clear”, steps in.
As well as waging war on thetans, the church also does a lot of work battling “psychiatric abuses” and trying to encourage people not to take drugs. And it seems the fight has come to East Grinstead. Recently, Dick Sweatman, a local Tory councillor and mayor of the town, signed a “drug-free” pledge on the high street in collaboration with an initiative sponsored by the Church of Scientology.
In most places eyebrows might have been raised at the involvement of Scientologists in local politics. In East Grinstead, however, I expect that most residents just accept this kind of thing as par for the course. In fact, I expect most residents are probably otherwise engaged. Because it isn’t just Cruise and his space-friends who have helped it develop such a unique reputation.
Possibly the strangest thing about East Grinstead is just how normal it looks. Or how normal if you have a view of England as a quietly conservative confection of timber-framed shops, cosy old pubs, and steam trains. It’s a pretty, unremarkable place. Until, that is, you start to notice the sheer density of religious buildings in the town and surrounding area. One of those nice old wooden buildings is occupied by the mystic order of Rosicrucians, for instance. The hair-shirt-fancying, self-flagellating ultra-Catholic order of Opus Dei also have a base nearby. So too do the Christian Scientists, the Ashworth Dowsers, and the Pagan Federation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also have a building in the area and the Anthroposophical Society (of spiritual fulfilment and Rudolf Steiner fame) work in town. To cap it all off, there are also a large number of more straightforwardly Christian denominations.
So, although East Grinstead may have just 24,000 inhabitants, it can rival Colorado Springs or Lourdes when it comes to the variety and devotion of its local religious communities. Which says a great deal about the admirable tolerance of the place – but probably less about your chances of walking along those timber-lined streets without bumping into someone who believes that the Earth was created in seven days – or that children are put in peril by plastic toys. At the very least, it’s endearingly unusual.
Hopefully Tom Cruise will feel right at home.
