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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