Playford Ward Chapel

A Meetinghouse on Uley Road

The Playford Ward Chapel stood at 3 Uley Road, Craigmore, in the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide, below the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges. It was a meetinghouse of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, built to serve the congregation formed when the Elizabeth Ward was divided in 1999, and it opened for its first sacrament meeting in 2003.

The building followed the standard plans the Church used for its meetinghouses around the world, adapted for an Australian suburb. It was a single-storey structure of pale brown brick under a low, gently pitched roof of dark tiles, with a slim white steeple rising above the chapel wing. Wide eaves shaded the windows against the summer sun. A sealed car park wrapped around two sides of the block, edged with a low hedge along the street and a run of steel fencing on the east boundary, where a strip of garden bed caught the winter light.

From Uley Road it looked like what it was: a modest, well-kept suburban church, distinguishable from its neighbours mainly by the steeple, the signboard on the lawn and the size of its car park.

Doors, Foyer and Noticeboard

Visitors entered through a pair of glass-panelled double doors under a covered porch, where an usher or greeter usually stood on Sunday mornings. Inside lay a carpeted foyer, its walls hung with framed prints of the Saviour and of the Adelaide Australia Temple. The foyer smelt of carpet cleaner and the building's ducted heating, which ran with a faint metallic tang through the winter months and never quite reached the corners.

The noticeboard on the foyer's left-hand wall was the building's unofficial record of ward life. Under the buzz of the fluorescent tubes it carried sign-up sheets, youth car wash notices, camp rosters, transport schedules and lesson swaps, pinned over one another until the corkboard disappeared. Lost property sometimes ended up there too. Children's gloves, hair ties and the occasional set of keys were pinned up in the hope that their owners would see them on the way into sacrament meeting.

A main hallway ran from the foyer through the length of the building. The bishop's office and the clerk's office opened off it, along with a small library where hymnbooks, lesson manuals, chalk and the building's ageing television trolley were kept.

The Chapel and the Cultural Hall

The chapel itself occupied the front wing, beneath the steeple. It seated around two hundred people on rows of wooden pews facing a raised stand, where the pulpit, the sacrament table and the seats for the bishopric and the day's speakers sat in front of a panelled wall in warm honey-coloured timber. An electronic organ stood to one side of the stand. The carpet was a muted blue-green, the walls a soft cream, and the light came from tall, narrow windows of frosted glass and rows of recessed downlights. There was no stained glass, no altar and no cross, in keeping with the Church's practice.

Behind the last row of pews, a folding partition opened onto the cultural hall, a large multi-purpose room with a sprung timber floor marked out for basketball, a stage at the far end and a basketball hoop at either end that could be winched up out of the way. On busy Sundays, at ward conferences and funerals, the partition was folded back and rows of grey stacking chairs were set out across the basketball court to extend the chapel. On weeknights the hall held youth activities, ward dinners, dances, Christmas parties and the ward basketball competition.

A kitchen with a servery hatch opened onto the hall. Its benches and urns saw constant use for funeral luncheons, linger-longers after the Sunday block, Relief Society activities and the endless rotation of casseroles and slices that ward events required.

Classrooms and Quiet Rooms

Along a rear corridor were the classrooms: rooms of various sizes with folding tables, stacking chairs, whiteboards and pin boards, used for Sunday School, Primary, the youth classes and the priesthood and Relief Society meetings that ran alongside one another in the second and third hours of the block. The largest of them, the Relief Society room, had a slightly better carpet, a piano and a set of upholstered chairs, and was treated with corresponding care.

The Primary room was the noisiest place in the building, its walls covered with children's drawings, laminated song charts and pictures of Book of Mormon prophets. A mothers' room near the chapel allowed parents to feed or settle infants while listening to sacrament meeting through a speaker on the wall. There was also a baptismal font, set into a tiled room behind sliding doors, with a small viewing area and changing rooms on either side, used for baptisms of children turning eight and of converts.

Wear and Use

Like most suburban meetinghouses, the Craigmore building was maintained by a mix of Church facilities contractors and volunteer members. Ward families took turns cleaning it on Saturday mornings. Hymnbooks went missing and reappeared. The carpet in the foyer wore thin along the path from the doors to the chapel, and the cultural hall floor was resealed every few years after heavy use. The heating struggled through Adelaide winters, and in summer the evaporative cooling barely kept pace on hot Sunday afternoons.

The building's busiest years came in the mid-2010s, when sacrament meeting filled most of the pews each week and, at ward conferences and on special occasions, spilled into the cultural hall. From the second half of 2018 the pews thinned noticeably, and for several years the partition stayed closed on all but the largest occasions. During the pandemic of 2020 the meetinghouse was closed for months, its car park empty on Sundays for the first time since it opened.

The new housing estates around Blakeview and Munno Para brought fresh families to the building in the early 2020s, and the Primary room filled up again. Through 2026 the meetinghouse at 3 Uley Road remained in use each Sunday and most weeknights, its foyer carpet worn a little thinner and its noticeboard as crowded as ever.