ST LUKE’S Church, Cowley, owed its existence to Lord Nuffield, creator of the Cowley car industry.

He provided the land in Oxford Road and paid for most of the building, which opened in 1938.

With Lord Nuffield as its benefactor and being so close to the Cowley car factories, it became known as the ‘car workers’ parish church’.

For many years, it celebrated Industrial Sunday and cars and all sorts of machinery produced locally were wheeled into the church to join the annual service.

At the first service in 1956, a car engine, a bus steering wheel and a refrigerator took pride of place as examples of modern engineering.

A year later, a mower made by John Allen and Sons, the Cowley engineering firm, was put on display, and in 1958, it was the turn of a new Morris Minor 1000 to take centre stage.

The same year, a plastic jig, a rear light and a scythe blade were carried up the aisle by workers and placed on a table as symbols of local labour.

Morris Motors’ Band regularly accompanied the hymns at the service, which attracted a large congregation of factory workers and their families.

The church was run at first in conjunction with the nearby St James and St Francis churches under the vicar, the Rev AG Whye, but each church was given its own management team when the Rev James Betton was appointed priestin- charge of St Luke’s in 1955.

Within a year, he was being praised for his “splendid leadership”. Mr Whye told church members at their first annual meeting in 1956: “It is a remarkable thing that you have got into harness so rapidly, so smoothly and so effectively.”

To put the three churches on a firm financial footing in the 1960s, they launched a Christian stewardship campaign under which parishioners and others supported them with ‘planned giving’.

Mr Betton, by then the vicar of Cowley, said they could no longer rely on bazaars, gift days and appeals to pay church bills because they were considered “unworthy and happy-go-lucky” events.

St Luke’s celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1963 in style, with special services, choral and orchestral concerts, parties and a pageant depicting the history of Cowley. Firework rockets were also fired from the church tower.

By the 1970s, however, the church, built to seat up to 800, was facing a crisis. The congregation had dwindled to between 80 and 100 people, oil heating bills had become prohibitive and there was talk of turning part of the building into a paper store for Nuffield Press.

After that and another plan to turn it into a shelter for the homeless were dropped, the church became a base for a local history project, with services continuing in a small part of the building.

The 50th anniversary in 1988 was celebrated with local pop group X-es performing a rock mass.

But the church’s days as a place of worship were numbered. It was declared redundant in the late 1990s and with the help of a £2.2m Lottery grant, was converted into the Oxfordshire Record Office, housing thousands of public records and historical documents.

Despite the change of use, the former church, which won an award from the British Society of Architects, remains an importan