Patrick Comerford
Two of us were in Mayfair the other day when we found an unexpected but timely reminder of the continuing plight of the people of war-racked Ukraine. While the war in Ukraine continues to wreak havoc, and as Trump fiddles and Putin burns away, it seems appropriate that one of the main churches in London that offers succour to Ukrainian refugees takes its name from the Holy Family in Exile.
The Ukrainian Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile stands on Duke Street in London and is the cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy of the Holy Family. It is the seat of the Ukrainian Catholic bishop in Britain and his eparchy or jurisdiction overlaps with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster and other dioceses.
Duke Street is in Mayfair, off Oxford Street, and the cathedral is open for every day. We visited on Ascension Day, and throughout the day, it seems, there was a constant flow of people through the doors, many in tears, praying silently, visibly upset and distressed.
The church was first designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905) in 1888 and built in 1891 as the Congregational King’s Weigh House Chapel.
Waterhouse is associated with the Gothic Revival in architecture, but he worked in other styles too. He best-known works include Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London. He designed many town halls, several hospitals, churches, chapels (such as the Lyndhurst Road Congregational Church, Hampstead), banks, and university buildings Cambridge (such as the chapel in Gonville and Caius College), in Oxford (such as the Broad Street frontage and college dining hall in Balliol College), Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.
He was born to Quaker parents, and at an early stage in his career he was heavily influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1849) and by AWN Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841).
The King’s Weigh House Chapel was built as a Congregational chapel in 1888-1891, but traced its story back to a congregation formed ca 1695, when Thomas Reynolds was called as minister. The congregation built a meeting house over the King’s Weigh House in Little Eastcheap in 1697, and took its name from this building. ‘Merchant Strangers’ were required to have their goods weighed at the King’s Weigh House so that customs duties could be assessed.
The chapel’s ministers included the Revd Thomas Binney (1798-1874) from 1829-1869, popularly known as the ‘Archbishop of Nonconformity’. During Binney’s ministry, the Weigh House site was acquired for street widening at London Bridge.
William Tate designed a new chapel in Fish Street Hill seating 1,000 people In 1833-1834. Prominent members during that time included Samuel Morley (1809-1886), the radical MP, philanthropist and abolitionist, and George Williams (1821-1905), who founded the YMCA in 1844.
The chapel site was compulsorily purchased by the Metropolitan Railway in 1882. By then, the members lived in the suburbs and the chapel needed to find a new location. The Duke of Westminster offered a site in Mayfair, part of which was included a small Congregational chapel on Robert Street, now Weigh House Street. The new chapel was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who also designed Eaton Hall for the Duke of Westminster.
The church was built on a site on the corner of Duke Street and Binney Street in what has been described as the Carolingian Romanesque style. It is built in brick with plentiful buff terracotta dressings and tiled roofs. It has an oval nave and a tower in the south-west corner, built in a Romanesque style. The ceramic tiles were made by Craven Dunnill and faience tiling was by Burmantofts.
Inside, the ground floor is rectangular in shape, but above it, at first floor level, is a spectacular elliptical or horseshoe-shaped wooden gallery and an elliptical ceiling. There are glazed brick walls and four structural columns faced in faience.
The architect Sir John James Burnet (1857-1938) designed sympathetic alterations to the chancel in 1903, including the east window with glass by Anning Bell, the east screen wall and the flanking organ cases.
The symmetry of the tripartite west entrance front on Duke Street is broken by the south-west corner tower with a steeple and, to the left, a gable ventilation turret. The triple arcaded porch is approached by a flight of steps. There is centre group of tall narrow round arched lancets, a relieving arch, and an elaborated gable with arcaded machicolations.
The tower has narrow arcaded screens at the middle stage and an octagonal bell stage, square, pinnacled, corner buttresses, and coupled gabled doorways at the head of the steps on Binney Street.
When the Revd William E Orchard (1877-1955) ministered in the chapel from 1914, the style of worship became increasingly more Catholic and liturgical. He resigned in 1932 and became a Roman Catholic priest three years later.
Orchard ordained the Revd Claud Coltman and the Revd Constance (Todd) Coltman as assistant ministers on 17 October 1917. Constance had been a member of the church before training at Mansfield College, Oxford, and she was one of the first woman to be ordained in a mainstream English denomination. The couple married the day after their ordination, and they later ministered in Wolverton from 1932 to 1940.
After Orchard left, the life of the King’s Weigh House Chapel was marked by decline in the 1930s. During the Blitz in World War II, a German bomb fell on the chancel during a Communion service on 20 October 1940, killing the minister’s wife and injuring one other person. The building then became a fire watching centre and rest centre. When the war ended in 1945, 22 members tried to revive the chapel. The Revd WJE Jeffery became the minister, with assistance from Claud and Constance Coltman who returned in 1946.
After the war damage was repaired, the church was rededicated in 1953. But the attendance declined in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the small Weigh House congregation decided to merge with Whitefield Memorial Church on Tottenham Court Road 60 years ago in July 1965.
The congregation was disbanded in March 1966 and the building was bought by the Ukrainian Catholic community in 1967. The former Congregational chapel become the new centre of a Ukrainian apostolic exarchate, created by Pope Pius XII in 1957.
Internal adjustments were then made to adapt the building to the Ukrainian Catholic liturgy. New pews were provided, the old pulpit was removed and a confessional designed by JF Bentley was brought from Westminster Cathedral. The building was Grade II* listed in 1970.
The cathedral closed temporarily in 2007 when part of the ceiling collapsed, but it was soon refurbished. The iconostasis created by a Ukrainian monk, Juvenalij Mokrytsky, was not damaged by the collapse.
The Ukrainian exarchate was elevated to the status of an eparchy or full bishopric by Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, and building is now the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile. The cathedral became a rallying point for the Ukrainian community in Britain during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski invited leading political and religious figures invited to speak in the cathedral.
The cathedral clergy include Father Mykola Matwijiwskyj, Parish Priest, Father Andrii Malysh, Father Mark Woodruff, who chairs the Society of Saint John Chrysostom, Father Bohdan Bilunyk and Father Andrew B Choma. The Divine Liturgy, usually in Ukrainian, is served on Sundays at 8 am, 10 am, 12 noon and 5 pm, with celebrations throughout the week too. The cathedral also has ‘Mission Points’ in Crawley, Feltham, High Wycombe, Luton and Waltham Cross.
Across the street from the cathedral, on the other side of Duke Street, the Italianate Brown Hart Gardens is a 10,000 sq ft (929 sq m) public garden on top of an electricity substation. The gardens began life as the Duke Street Gardens where a communal garden was laid for the working class families then living in Brown Street and Hart Street.
The street level gardens were removed in 1902, and the Duke Street Electricity Substation was built in 1902-1905 in a Baroque style to a design by the architect Charles Stanley Peach (1858-1934). To compensate local residents for the loss of the old communal garden, the Duke of Westminster insisted that a paved Italian garden was placed on top of the substation, and this was completed in 1906.
After being closed for 20 years, the site was revamped and reopened to the public in October 2007. Further refurbishment in 2013 funded by the Grosvenor Estate includes a glass building at the west with the Garden Café run by Benugo, and more than 60 seating and planter items.
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