The prisoners were believed to have been available to the town to be used for manual labor in the timber harvesting of the local forests. These days Holmbury St. Mary is an oddity, as it still, by law, requires Parish council tax payers to pay an additional sum - a Precept - to one of two civil parishes in England. From 1947 to 1986, a large building hosted the Webb Memorial Trust for Rethinking Poverty as a tribute to Beatrice Webb and her work. The Beatrice Webb House was opened by Clement Attlee and served as an important education and discussion facility for the Fabian Society, British Labour Party and trade unions. The Fabian Window, designed by George Bernard Shaw (who co-founded the London School of Economics (LSE) with Sidney and Beatrice Webb), depicting the founders of the Fabian Society, hung in the house until it was stolen in 1978. The window was recovered in 2005 and is now on long-term loan to the London School of Economics. Today the house is a boarding house for Hurtwood House School. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin is part of the Leith Hill United Benefice which includes the churches of St James, Abinger Common and Christ Church, Coldharbour. Inside it has a triptych behind the altar that is attributed to Spinello Aretino and in the North Chapel a painting attributed to Jacopo da Sellaio. The surgeon, histologist and anatomist Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet is buried in the village churchyard along with Mariquita Street, second daughter of Robert Proctor. Holmbury St. Mary is home to the University College London's Department of Space and Climate Physics Mullard Space Science Laboratory, which is the country's largest purely University-led space science research group. The laboratory was established at Holmbury St. Mary in 1966 and since then has participated in more than 35 satellite missions and over 200 rocket experiments. The village layout is known as a nucleated village, that centres around a church over looking the village green. The village itself is situated within a ravine, which had once been home to small sandstone quarry and clay brick businesses for the area. The village contains two contrasting styles of architecture represented by the Woodhouse Copse, an Arts and Crafts style cottage designed by Oliver Hill in 1926, and Joldwynds, a Modernist house also by Oliver Hill, in 1932. Though many of the houses these days have a brick exterior leaning more towards the cottage style.