Patrick Comerford
The Church of Saint Mary le Strand is a landmark building at the heart of the Strand-Aldwych District in London and is a celebrated architectural gem. Simon Jenkins in England’s Thousand Best Churches describes it as ‘the finest eighteenth century church in London.’
The Strand is part of West End theatreland and runs for 1.2 km from Trafalgar Square east to Temple Bar, where the street becomes Fleet Street in the City of London. Saint Mary le Strand is known as one of the two ‘Island Churches,’ the other being Saint Clement Danes, a few steps to the east. Until recently, the church formed a traffic island to the north of Somerset House and south of Bush House, once the headquarters of the BBC World Service. Close by are King’s College London, the Royal Courts of Justice and Australia House.
Saint Mary le Strand is in a prominent place on the processional route from Westminster and Buckingham Palace to the City of London. But to generations of bus drivers and taxi drivers, it was known as ‘Saint Mary’s in the Way,’ and sadly it was seen by motorists and urban planners alike as little more than an eyesore or an obstruction on what was long a congested artery.
Now the church is at the heart of the newly pedestrianised district of Strand-Aldwych and, with its elegant and dignified worship space, it is being embraced once more as a sanctuary and place of peace in this part of the City of Westminster.
I first visited Saint Mary le Strand when I was a teenager, and I called in again last week when I was back in London and strolling from Smithfield through the City, down Fleet Street and into Trafalgar Square.
The church is the second in the area to have been called Saint Mary le Strand. The first church was a short distance to the south. The date of its foundation is unclear but it was mentioned in a judgment in 1222, when it was called the Church of the Innocents, or Saint Mary and the Innocents.
That church was pulled down in 1549 by Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, to make way for Somerset House. The parishioners were promised a new church. But it was never built, and they were forced to move to Saint Clement Danes nearby and afterwards to the Savoy Chapel.
After the Great Fire and the rebuilding of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the City Commissioners proposed a scheme to build 50 new churches for London, with Saint Mary’s as the first. The site of the present church was once occupied by a great maypole. It was the scene of May Day festivities in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was severely decayed by the early 18th century.
The parishioners successfully petitioned the Commissioners in 1711 for a new church to be built in the Strand. The church became part of an extensive new church building effort in the early 1700s (‘Queen Anne Churches’). Saint Mary le Strand was the first of the 12 new churches built in London under the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, at a cost of £16,000.
Saint Mary le Strand is a beautiful example of baroque design by James Gibbs (1682-1754), an Aberdeen-born architect who had a sophisticated knowledge of ancient, Renaissance and contemporary European architecture. The church was his first major project following his return from Rome, where he had trained in the studio of Carlo Fontana.
The new church was planned, in part, as a monument to Queen Anne and to the High Church ascendancy of her final years. But when Queen Anne died in 1714, the House of Hanover and the Whig government wound down the commission, and only 12 of 50 planned churches were built. Those that were built – the others were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer – are among the outstanding examples of English church architecture.
Building work began in February 1714, and from the outset the architecture of Saint Mary le Strand proved controversial. The architect later expressed unhappiness at the way that his plans had been altered by the Commissioners. According to Gibbs, the church was originally intended to be an Italianate structure with a small campanile over the west end and no steeple.
Gibbs planned a 76 metre (250 ft) column surmounted with a statue of Queen Anne to the west of the church. A great quantity of stone was brought to the spot, but the plan was abandoned when Queen Anne died. Instead, Gibbs was ordered to reuse the stone to build a steeple, which was completed in September 1717 but which fundamentally altered the plan of the church.
The extravagant Baroque ornamentation of the exterior was criticised at the time. The prominent situation of the church has also been problematic. Gibbs designed the ground floor without windows in order to keep out the noise of traffic on the Strand.
The interior is richly decorated with a plastered ceiling in white and gold, with a ceiling inspired by Luigi Fontana’s work in the church of Santi Apostoli and Pietro da Cortona’s Santi Luca e Martina, both in Rome. The porch was inspired by Cortona’s Santa Maria della Pace. The walls were influenced by Michelangelo and the steeple shows the influence of Sir Christopher Wren.
Gibbs also took ideas from Saint Paul’s Cathedral – completed in 1711 after almost half a century of work – and reworked Wren’s ideas in a new context. The semi-circular projections of the west and east elevations, for example, were inspired by the north porch and east end of Saint Paul’s, and inside the east end resembles Wren’s design in many ways.
The church was consecrated 300 years ago on 1 January 1724 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, and the Revd John Heylyn became the first rector of the rebuilt church.
James Gibbs went on to design Saint Martin-in-the-Fields in 1722–1726 and which I visited immeidately after that same afternoon.
Bonnie Prince Charlie is alleged to have renounced his Roman Catholic allegiance in the church to become an Anglican during a secret visit to London in 1750.
One of the decorative urns surmounting the exterior of the church fell in 1802 and killed a passer-by during a procession.
John Dickens and Elizabeth Barrow, the parents of Charles Dickens, were married in the church in 1809.
The church was restored in 1871 by Robert Jewell Withers, who removed the box pews and had them re-formed into elegant benches with scrolling sides. The tiled floor in the nave and chancel are also his work. His changes were met by praise, and survive to this day.
Over the three centuries since its consecration in 1724, the road surrounding the church was gradually widened, taking great bites out of the churchyard and threatening to devour the church itself.
The church narrowly escaped destruction twice in the 20th century. At the start of the 20th century, London County Council proposed to demolish the church to widen the Strand. A campaign involving the artist Walter Crane succeeded in averting this, although the graveyard was obliterated and the graves were moved to Brookwood Cemetery.
During World War II, the Blitz caused much damage to the surrounding area and the church was damaged by a nearby bomb explosion, but avoided destruction.
Threats to the church only seemed to grow, and Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) wrote his last poem in 1980 as part of a campaign to protect the church and to raise funds for its restoration.
It seemed time had finally run out for Saint Mary le Strand in 2017. With the congregation in single digits, the Diocese of London prepared to sell it off to become a UK outpost of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. Stripped of furniture and fittings, one of London’s architectural glories would have been reduced to little more than an empty shell. The members of the parish church council all resigned in protest.
Since 2022, however, the church’s urban context has been completely transformed. Gone are the streams of traffic that smothered it on either side, replaced by raised beds and picnic benches, part of a scheme to unite the campuses of three of London’s universities, King’s College, the London School of Economics and the Courtauld Institute, into a single ‘Global Cultural Thinking Quarter’.
Once an inconvenience, the church is now hailed as the ‘Jewel in the Strand’, the focus of London’s newest piazza. The project is not yet totally successful, the zigzagging benches in the supposedly Italianate piazza have been described as having ‘a strange, playground quality,’ and the aims of the Global Cultural Thinking Quarter are criticised as being ill-defined. Yet, a once unappealing street is now abuzz with people, and many of them are visiting the church too.
One major ambition is to make the raised ground floor accessible and to turn the crypt into a multipurpose space for events and church activities. Above ground, the church hopes to restore original features and relight the space to show its highlight the plasterwork ceiling to better advantage. The church has been awarded a grant of £3.9 million and is currently fundraising for the additional £4.5 million. Saint Mary le Strand is inviting people to sponsor flowers on its famous ceiling as part of a fundraising drive.
The church launched the ‘Jewel in the Strand’ campaign last September. The spectacular floral plaster ceiling will be the centrepiece of the church’s transformation, with donors invited to sponsor a flower, including roses, acorns and sunflowers.
The ‘Jewel in the Strand’ project is central to the wider Strand Aldwych Project. Works will begin in September 2025, with the formal reopening planned in late 2026.
St Mary-Le-Strand by John Betjeman:
Shall we give Gibbs the go by
Great Gibbs of Aberdeen,
Who gave the town of Cambridge
The Senate House Serene;
Every son of Oxford
Can recognise he’s home
When he sees upon the skyline
The Radcliffe’s mothering dome.
Placid about the chimney pots His sculptured steeples soar,
Windowless he designs his walls
Above the traffic’s roar.
Whenever you put stone on stone
You edified the scene,
Your chaste baroque was on its own,
Great Gibbs of Aberdeen.
A Tory and a Catholic
There’s nothing quite so grand
As the baroque of your chapel
Of St Mary in the Strand.
• The Revd Canon Dr Peter Babington has been the Priest in Charge at St Mary le Strand since September 2020. Previously he was the Vicar of Bournville (2002-2020). His great-grandfather, Richard Babington (1869-1952), was the Dean of Cork in 1914-1951. The church has three services during the week: Tuesday, 1 pm; Said Eucharist; Wednesday, 6 pm, Sung Eucharist with Hymns; Thursday, 8 pm, Compline (Night Prayer) online via Zoom.
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