Category: Religion Page 1 of 20

A Hawksmoor Church and a riverside walk.

On 2nd July 2026

In Architecture, Memorials, Religion, Sculpture, Social History, Stained Glass, Wartime

A few weeks ago, a sunny day that wasn’t too hot tempted me to visit Greenwich, one of my favourite places.

First on the list to visit was a Nicholas Hawksmoor masterpiece, the church of St Alfege …

Alfege, Archbishop of Canterbury, was taken hostage by Danish invaders who took him to Greenwich, hoping to raise a large ransom. St Alfege refused to be ransomed, as it would mean starvation for many of his people. As a result he was martyred in 1012 …

During a drunken Easter feast the frustrated Vikings pelted him with the leftover meat and bones of cattle and oxen. He was eventually put out of his misery with a fatal blow from an axe, hence the animal skull and the axe in the stained glass image.

This is the third building on the site and was designed by Hawksmoor in 1711. Unfortunately, on 19 March 1941, two incendiary devices hit the church causing huge damage and little of the original interior now remains. After the war the leading British architect, Albert Richardson, restored the church in a way which combines both traditional and modern approaches. The work was completed in 1953.

There is some beautiful stained glass.

The east window, above the altar, was installed in 1953. It shows the risen Christ and beneath, St Alfege and Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII …

There is also a series of post-war stained glass windows by Francis Spear depicting famous historical figures associated with the church, including General Wolfe …

Wolfe died aged 32, leading his troops to victory at Quebec, a turning point in the struggle between Britain and France for control of Canada. Wolfe, who worshipped here, is buried in a family vault in the crypt.

Some more important people and events …

Finally, ‘the father of English church music’ …

From 1540 t0 1585, the church was lucky enough to have Thomas Tallis as church organist …

Engraving by Niccolò Haym after a portrait by Gerard van der Gucht.

Tallis is considered one of England’s greatest composers and parts of this old keyboard may date from his period with the church …

The Chandelier was installed in 1998 and has 58 electric candle lights …

The dove at the top symbolises the Holy Spirit …

Bell Ringing boast …

Some generous benefactors including, in 1577: ‘William Riplar, Fisherman gave his house called the Peter boat to the poor for ever‘ and in 1605, Joyce Whitehead gave 5 shillings to repair the church every year. All fascinating local tales of charity….

There are cherubs in the bottom corners of the benefactors’ board …

The ironwork in the galleries (and the altar rails) survived the bombing and are from the workshop of the French Huguenot Jean Tijou, who also produced work for St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court …

You’ll find more cherubs outside …

Some extremely informative, and beautifully worded, memorials …

Major Dinwiddy was a very talented man …

Here he is as pictured in the Western Front Association Magazine along with a fascinating article about the rangefinder …

Conrad Dinwiddy was born in Greenwich in 1881, and was the son of London architect and surveyor, Thomas Dinwiddy who had an architectural practice based in Greenwich.

Like his father, Conrad was also a surveyor, and initially developed a rangefinder to make it easier for ground batteries to hit the Zeppelins that were attacking British cities. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916, where he was posted to the Western Front in charge of a six inch howitzer battery. He would continue inventing improvements to how guns were aimed, firing from barges, and the methods for transporting ammunition.

He was wounded by German battery fire on the 26th of September, 1917, and died the following day. He is buried in a military cemetery in Belgium. The memorial in St. Alfege has the wrong date, as he died a day earlier on the 27th of September. You can read more about him, the church, and Greenwich in general in the excellent London Inheritance blog.

The ‘South African War’ …

Despite the destruction meted out in 1941, it remains a lovely, atmospheric church (Photos by David Iliff 2015 – Creative Commons) …

There is, of course, another Hawksmoor masterpiece in the City of London, St Mary Woolnoth, which you can read about here.

Still in Greenwich, a few yards away and dated 1814 …

The inclusion of Education and Industry in its title reflects the standard early 19th-century curriculum for lower-class girls. Alongside reading, writing, and religious catechism, the students were taught practical industrial/domestic skills (such as needlework, spinning, and straw-plaiting) to prepare them for future employment as domestic servants or textile workers.

I headed for the river as the day got warmer and then encountered this monster …

You can just see the masts of the Cutty Sark in the distance on the right …

Two vessels, 150 years of history between them.

Looking towards the City …

The Scalpel, The Cheesegrater, 22 Bishopsgate and The Gherkin all lined up …

Looking towards Canary Wharf …

This extraordinary monument to Peter the Great (unveiled in 2001) is a short walk along the river path from the centre of Greenwich, overlooking Deptford Creek. According to the Russian/English dedication it is ‘a gift of the Russian people and commemorates the visit of Peter the Great to this country in search of knowledge and experience’. For a few months in 1698, as part of his ‘Grand Embassy’, Peter stayed in the area to study shipbuilding in the famous Deptford dockyards, which had been built in 1513 by Henry VIII. Visitors to the statue often remark on its odd setting, in a modern housing development, and on the smallness of Peter’s head …

A tall, rangy Peter holds a pipe and a telescope and looks out over the Thames, his expression unreadable. He is flanked by a dwarf (he brought one with him to England), a throne, and parapets featuring Russian and English inscriptions, cannon, sea-monster heads, a mysterious triangle filled with balls, and depictions of food and drink. The singular look is the work of two Russians, architect Viacheslav Bikhaev and sculptor Mihail Chemiakin. Some of the unusual style of the work can be put down to Chemiakin’s interests in the playful and the grotesque …

Greenwich never disappoints.

I didn’t get to the Fan Museum as planned …

… maybe next time.

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More Fitzrovia! Including a vampiric Council leader and a freed slave who became a best-selling author.

By The City Gent

On 21st May 2026

In Architecture, Art, Religion, Sculpture, Social History, Special Exhibitions

As promised last week, I’m going to write a little more about my journey ‘west’ to Fitzrovia.

Firstly, I’m grateful to the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association for the explanation on their website as to where the name Fitzrovia originated. Here is an extract: Biographer Paul Willetts describes the name Fitzrovia as a “retrospective label applied to a district of central London where, between roughly 1925 and 1950, the pubs, restaurants, cafés, and drinking clubs provided a fashionable rendezvous for a diverse range of writers with a taste for bohemian life. The label, which had passed into common usage by the early 1960s, acknowledged the one-time status of the Fitzroy Tavern, at 16 Charlotte Street, as the area’s pre-eminent venue. Together with Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street forms the crooked spine of Fitzrovia.” You can read more on their very informative and interesting website.

Where is Fitzrovia? A screenshot from the Association website …

I wrote about the beautiful Fitzrovia Chapel in last week’s blog and here are some more aspects of the area that I found interesting.

First up is the Fitzrovia Mural …

Here’s the key …

The area was often under threat of redevelopment, so the former leader of the Greater London Council, Horace Cutler, is depicted as a vampire. He was also famous at the time for his bow ties …

The mural started to deteriorate significantly over the years but has now been restored. You can read more about the work here.

The best view is from Whitfield Gardens …

I am indebted to the brilliant blog Ian Visits for the background to this area. There’s much more on his website.

Sitting to the north of the park is a church. The original Congregational Chapel opened in 1756 with a graveyard space to the south. Thanks to being a bit too popular, the original building was demolished and rebuilt in 1890. However, that chapel was destroyed on Palm Sunday 1945 by the last V-2 rocket to fall on London.The current chapel was built in 1957, and was taken over by the American International Church in 1972.

The original church’s graveyard had closed to burials in 1856. It was later bought by the London County Council in 1894, possibly in a deal aligned with the rebuilding of the chapel.

Although former graveyards that are turned into public parks are often lined with graves, the only noticeable one is the very easy to trip over grave for John and Mary Procter, and (in the top left of this picture) a stone plaque marking the decision of local cheese shop owners, Robert and Esther Procter to donate some land here for the public …

Nearby (but now long lost) was the grave of this man, Olaudah Equiano …

Born in about 1745, a free man in part of present day Nigeria, at the age of about eleven, Equiano was captured and enslaved. His ownership changed hands several times until one of his owners allowed him to buy his freedom in 1766. He subsequently travelled widely before settling in London where he became one of the leading lights of the campaign to end slavery …

Equiano was a shrewd businessman and his ‘Interesting Narrative’ was also a major success (it went through nine editions in his lifetime alone) and, when he died in 1797, he left a sum equivalent to about £80,000 at today’s prices to his surviving daughter (his will can be viewed at The National Archives in Kew).

You can read more here.

Just across the road is the magnificent frontage of Heal & Son …

I love the panels displaying the goods and services available …

You can read a fascinating history of the store here. For example, after John Heal the founder died in 1833 his widow renamed the business Fanny Heal & Son!

All Saints Margaret Street is the most well-known church in the area. It is built in the high-Victorian gothic style and is Grade I listed …

The 1841 specification for a ‘Model Church on a large and splendid scale’ specified that:

It must be in the Gothic style of the late 13th and early 14th centuries
It must be honestly built of solid materials
Its ornament should decorate its construction
Its artist should be ‘a single, pious and laborious artist alone, pondering deeply over his duty to do his best for the service of God’s Holy Religion

Above all the church must be built so that the ‘Rubricks and Canons of the Church of England may be consistently observed, and the Sacraments rubrically and decently administered’.

My images of this splendid building will give you an idea whether expectations were met.

You can read more about the church’s history and architecture here.

Closer to home, and just across the footbridge between the Barbican Highwalk and Moorfields, Post-it Man is back – and he doesn’t look very happy …

Finally, there are two things happening at the Barbican Centre at the moment that you may like to visit.

Origo at the Sculpture Court …

And In Other Worlds in The Curve …

I’ll probably write about both next week.

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The extraordinary Fitzrovia Chapel.

By The City Gent

On 14th May 2026

In Architecture, Religion, Social History

I went west again last week with a view to visiting some interesting places of worship having now, over the years, written about all the City of London churches (you’ll find my earlier blogs under the Category ‘Religion’).

The outside of the Fitzrovia Chapel is decoration-free red brick, offering not a clue as to what awaits you when you enter …

Nothing quite prepared me for the effect the chapel had on me when I walked in …

A wonderful sense of peace and tranquility. I immediately stepped forward, took a seat close to the altar, and sat in silent contemplation …

For over 100 years, the chapel served as a place of solace, prayer and rest for staff and patients of the Middlesex Hospital and their families. It was always open between services, and groups of different faiths (and none) from within the hospital gathered in the tiny building throughout the working week. Marriages between medical staff, or between very ill patients and their partners, took place here, as well as concerts, memorials, seasonable celebrations and choir rehearsals.

Notes on the chapel website tell us that many present-day visitors have spent time here before, whether as a medical professional, family member or patient and the memories they share contain moving descriptions of chapel life in the past. Doctors or nurses visiting to find quiet after a difficult shift; porters sitting quietly in the candlelight reflecting on a day’s work; mothers taking their first trip out of the ward with their new-borns; or families and friends returning to the chapel time after time while caring for their loved ones. This tiny chapel provided a space for the population of the Middlesex Hospital to attend to their interior lives — their needs, hopes, griefs and celebrations were routinely observed beneath its starry ceiling …

The Middlesex Hospital was founded in 1745 and, by 1757, had moved to a larger, purpose-built site on Mortimer Street, which would be its home until closure in 2008.

The hospital in 2007, just before demolition …

The three acre site in September 2008, with the little chapel preserved amid the desolation …

The hospital was originally built without a dedicated chapel. Prayers and religious services took place in the simplicity of its wood-panelled Board Room. But in the 1880s one of the hospital’s surgeons, George Lawson, suggested that the existing ‘dead-house’ could be converted into a new chapel. Lawson recommended an architect, and offered money towards the project. Within a decade sufficient funds had been raised to erect a hospital chapel on the site of the old mortuary and post-mortem room. An important tranche of funding came from a lady governor in memory of the hospital’s Chairman, Alexander Ross. The chapel’s main carcase was up and roofed by 1890, but the interior decoration took longer to complete. A commitment had been made that no money raised for the care of patients should be spent on the chapel, so the interior was completed gradually over the next 50 years, as donations large and small permitted. Appeals were run, musical concerts performed, bequests arranged, and funds for memorials collected.

John Loughborough Pearson, the architect behind Two Temple Place, was commissioned to design the chapel. Construction started in 1891 when Pearson was already near the end of his life and, after John’s death in 1897, his son Frank took over.

The fabric of the chapel was allowed to decline in the closing decades of the hospital and a £2 million restoration of the chapel was carried out by conservation architects Caroe & Partners between 2013 and 2015. It involved improvements to external brickwork, and extensive work on the mosaic ceiling, which had suffered greatly due to water ingress. The external roof had aged poorly, penetrated by rainwater which damaged mosaics and several marble panels. In some places, up to 70% of the ceiling tiles required re-gilding, and extensive scaffolding was erected throughout the chapel to enable restorers to access and restore designs.

King Charles III delivered his 2024 Christmas message from the chapel, a significant break from tradition marking the first time in over a decade it was filmed outside a royal residence …

The choice highlighted his focus on healthcare, community and unity following his and the Princess of Wales’s cancer treatment.

Here are images of some of the features of the chapel I captured for the blog.

The font in the stunning south west apse …

It’s carved from a single block of green marble …

It contains a Greek palindrome copied from the Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople:

Νίψον ἀνομήματα, μὴ μόναν ὄψιν
(Wash the sins, not only the face)

This inscription can also be found on the font in St Martin within Ludgate on Ludgate Hill in the City …

You can read more about this church in my blog of July 2022.

The aumbry was given in memory of Prince Francis of Teck who died in 1910 and was the younger brother of Queen Mary. It features a carving of the Pelican in her Piety, a common image of redemption in ecclesiastical design …

There is also some very good stained glass …

Rudyard Kipling’s body rested here in January 1936 following his death at the adjacent hospital before his funeral at Westminster Abbey …

In the entrance narthex, 85 plaques honour donors, distinguished hospital staff, and staff who died on duty, with many dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries …

My eyes were drawn to this plaque …

Beck became a consultant neurosurgeon at the hospital in 1947, making her the first female consultant at a London teaching hospital that did not admit women students. At Middlesex, she was the first woman and the first neurosurgeon on staff, as well as being the only consultant neurosurgeon in western Europe and North America at the time …

In 1952 she received attention in the press for performing lifesaving surgery on A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the Pooh two months after he suffered a brain haemorrhage.

You can read more about the chapel here. And here are some contributions by two of my favourite bloggers: A London Inheritance and Living London History.

On my church agenda was the Grade 1 listed All Saints Church, Margaret Street, a Victorian masterpiece …

I shall aim to write more about it next week along with another church of similar vintage I visited last week in my western travels. It boasted a model of the building made of matchsticks …

It was created, the notice says, ‘by a talented member of the choir’. Bless.

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