Patrick Comerford
When I was in Holborn and the Hatton Garden area recently for an event in Saint Alban’s Church, Holborn, organised by USPG and SPCK, I visited a number of churches in the area, including Saint Alban’s, Saint Etheldreda’s Church on Ely Place, the City Temple, and Saint Peter’s Church on Saffron Hill on Clerkenwell Road, facing the top end of Hatton Garden.
Saint Peter’s Italian Church has been described as one of the most beautiful churches in London and is the oldest church for Italians in London. It just within the boundaries of the London Borough of Camden, but it is the spiritual home of the Italian community in Clerkenwell (‘Little Italy’), with its hub in the Borough of Islington.
The church has a modest outer appearance and seems to be hemmed in between the neighbouring tall buildings, including an Italian restaurant to the left, and the Bryson Hotel to the right, so that only the later, narrow entrance front and loggia can be seen from the street. But inside the church has a large and splendid interior.
In the early 19th century, Saffron Hill was a poor neighbourhood with crowded and decadent streets, known for pickpockets and fences. By 1850, about 2,000 Italian immigrants were living there, many working as street musicians, artisans, framers, and makers of mirrors, barometers and scientific instruments. These Italians did not have their own church and so used in the Capella Reale Sarda in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Saint Vincent Pallotti (1795-1850), an Italian priest and founder of the Union of the Catholic Apostolate or Pallotine Fathers, decided in 1845 to build a church for Italian emigrants in London. After the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England, sensitivities about the ‘papal aggression’ were still high. Saint Vincent Pallotti was supported by the prominent Italian politician and activist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), who was living in exile in London at the time.
The church was designed by the Dublin-born Irish architect Sir John Miller-Bryson (1822-1864), whose name is recalled in the Bryson Hotel to the right of the church. Bryson worked from plans drawn up by Francesco Gualandi of Bologna and modelled on the Basilica of San Crisogono in Trastevere in Rome. At first, the new church was to hold 3,400 people, but the original grand designs were never fully realised due to a shortage of funds.
In the course of work, as the church was built in 1862-1863, its size was greatly reduced. Yet, it was the largest Catholic church in Britain for the next 40 years and the only church the built in Britain in the style of a Roman basilica style.
The church was consecrated on 16 April 1863 as the Church of Saint Peter for All Nations, and was the first Italian church outside Italy. The architect Bryson died the following year (3 October 1864) and was buried in Brompton Cemetery.
Saint Peter’s Church is 19 metre high church with a capacity for 2,000 people. The front section has a loggia and portico with twin arches. Above them are three niches: the central alcove has a statue of Christ, while the side alcoves have statues of Saint Bede and Saint George. Between the alcoves, two large mosaics depict two scenes in the life and ministry of Saint Peter: the first miraculous draught of fish (see Luke 5: 1-11), which results in Peter, James and John following Jesus; and Christ giving the keys of the Kingdom to Saint Peter (see Matthew 16: 19).
Above the façade, a 33-metre-high bell tower built in 1891 houses a bell known as the ‘Steel Monster’. The great bell was cast in 1862 by Naylor Vickers of Sheffield and was one of several bells exhibited at the International Exhibition that year. At the time, the only other large bell in London, apart from Big Ben in Westminster, was Great Tom in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
The ‘Steel Monster’ remains one of the largest bells in England, though there are larger Roman Catholic bells at Downside, Ampleforth and in Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathedral.
The organ is part of the original organ built by the Belgian company Annaesens in 1886 and at the time it was considered one of the best in the country.
There are two wall memorials in the loggia: one, installed in 1927, remembers veterans, mostly Italian Britons of World War I; the other, installed in 1960, commemorates the 446 Italians who died on the SS Arandora Star in 1940.
Mussolini declared war on Britain on 10 June 1940, and after Churchill’s famous outburst, ‘Collar the lot!’, many Italians were interned. The SS Arandora Star sailed from Liverpool for Canada on 1 July 1940 with 712 Italian internees on board. The remaining passengers included 479 interned German men, among them a number of Jewish refugees, and 86 German prisoners of war – 1,216 detainees in total – and there was a crew of almost 400 British military guards and merchant sailors.
The SS Arandora Star was without escort and had no Red Cross insignia. On 2 July 1940, it was sunk by a German U-boat about 75 miles west of Bloody Foreland, Co Donegal, with great loss of life. One of the internees on board, the German Captain Otto Burfeind, went down with the ship having organised the lifeboat evacuation of British, German and Italian men alike. Over 800 people – British, Italian and German – were lost. It was the worst mass loss of life of any foreign-based Italian community.
During World War II, when many Italian immigrants were interned, the Irish Pallottine fathers took care of the church. During the war, Polish Catholics were permitted to worship and hold services in Polish in the church, as they had no other church. The church returned to the Italian Pallottines in 1953, and since then it has been substantially remodelled. Today it is a Grade II listed building.
Little Italy’s core historical borders are usually placed at Clerkenwell Road, Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue, comprising the Saffron Hill part of Clerkenwell. The Clerkenwell area spans the London boroughs of Camden and Islington. Today, the Italian community in London is more dispersed, but the church remains a major venue for the community of Little Italy.
A highlight in the community calendar is the annual processione in mid-July. The annual procession began in the 1880s, and is believed to be the first of its kind in England since the Reformation. It remains a focal point of the calendar in Little Italy.
Sunday Masses in Saint Peter’s are at 7 pm on Saturdays, and 9:30 am, 11 am (Sung), 12: 30 and 7 pm. Masses on Holy Days are at 10 am, 12:15 pm and 7:30 pm. Weekday Masses are at 12:15 pm, Monday to Friday.
