Patrick Comerford
When I was in London a few days ago, one of the churches I visited was Saint Giles-in-the-Fields. Saint Giles Day was last Monday (1 September 2025), and I marked the day by posting photographs and memories of a half a dozen churches I know with his name. But Saint Giles Day is being celebrated in Saint Giles-in-the-Fields today, with Choral Holy Communion, sung by the Saint Giles Quartet (11 am) and Evensong sung by the Saint Giles Choir.
Saint Giles-in-the-Fields is the parish church of the St Giles area in the London Borough of Camden. St Giles is part of the West End, and much or all of St Giles usually is taken to be a part of Bloomsbury. The places of interest include Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, Seven Dials, the Phoenix Garden, and St Giles Circus.
St Giles Circus was the site of a gallows until the 15th century, the Great Plague in 1665 started in St Giles, and in the 18th and 19th centuries the Rookery was one of the worst slums in Britain, with a large Irish Catholic population that gave the area nicknames such as ‘Little Ireland’ and ‘The Holy Land’. St Giles Rookery and the Seven Dials were known for poverty and squalor and became centres for crime, prostitution, gambling houses and ‘gin palaces’, and ‘Saint Giles’ Greek’ was a secret language used by thieves and beggars.
The Church of Saint Giles-in-the-Fields gives its name to the surrounding district of St Giles, between Seven Dials, Bloomsbury, Holborn and Soho. But the church traces its story back to the chapel of a 12th-century monastery and leper hospital in the fields between Westminster and the City of London.
The present church is the third on the site since 1101 and was rebuilt in the Palladian style to designs by the architect Henry Flitcroft in 1731-1733.
The first recorded church on the site was a chapel of the Parish of Holborn attached to a monastery and leper hospital founded by Matilda of Scotland, the wife of Henry I, ca 1101-1109. It was later attached to the larger Hospital of the Lazar Brothers at Burton Lazars, Leicestershire.
When Saint Giles was founded, it stood outside the City of London, on the main road to Tyburn and Oxford. Between 1169 and 1189, Henry II granted the hospital the lands, gifts and privileges that secured its future.
The chapel probably began to function as the church of a hamlet that grew up around the hospital. The hospital buildings would have included the church, the Master’s House, and the ‘Spittle Houses’, and the Precinct of the Hospital may have included the whole of the island site now bounded by Saint Giles High Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.
A Papal Bull in the 13th century confirmed the hospital’s privileges and granted it special protection. Edward I assigned it in 1299 to the Hospital of Burton Lazars, Leicestershire, a house of the order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. The warden of the hospital was answerable to the Master of Burton Lazars.
Richard II transferred the hospital, chapel and lands to the Cistercian abbey of Saint Mary de Graces by the Tower of London in 1391. But after a legal and sometimes violent dispute, the Cistercian ownership was revoked in 1402 and the hospital was returned to the Lazar Brothers.
Saint Giles Fields was at the centre of Sir John Oldcastle’s Lollard uprising in 1414. Many of the rebels were brutally executed and Oldcastle was hanged in chains and burnt ‘gallows and all’ in St Giles Fields on 14 December 1417.
At the dissolution of the monastic houses during the Tudor Reformation, Saint Giles Hospital and the Hospital of Burton St Lazar were dissolved in 1544, and all the hospital lands, rights and privileges, excluding the chapel, were granted to John Dudley, Lord Lisle, in 1548. The chapel survived as the local parish church, and when the first Rector of Saint Giles was appointed in 1547, the phrase ‘in the fields’ was added to the name to distinguish it from Saint Giles, Cripplegate.
Saint Giles was at the centre of the Babington Plot later in the 16th century. Pope Pius V issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, in 1570, giving licence to English Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth I. A group of recusants, secret Catholics and Jesuits drew up a plan in 1585 in the precincts of Saint Giles to murder Elizabeth I, invite a Spanish invasion of England, and place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne.
When the plot was exposed, the conspirators were returned to Saint Giles churchyard to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Ballard and Babington and others were executed on 20 September 1586; Mary Queen of Scots was executed on 8 February 1587.
After parts of the mediaeval church collapsed in the 1610s, work on building a new church began in 1623. It was completed in 1630 and was consecrated by William Laud, Bishop of London, on 26 January 1630.
The Rector of Saint Giles, the Revd Roger Maynwaring, was fined and deprived of his clerical functions by Parliament in 1628 after two sermons advocating the divine right of kings and he was accused of challenging the rights of Parliament.
When Archbishop Laud’s former chaplain, William Heywood, became the rector in 1638, he began to transform Saint Giles in the High Church, Laudian fashion. Puritan parishioners presented a petition to parliament accusing Heywood of ‘popish reliques’ and said he had introduced ‘at needless expense to the parish’, including an elaborate carved oak screen and expensive altar rails.
Heywood was still the rector when the English Civil War began in 1642, and most of the ornaments his ornamentation was stripped out and sold off in 1643. After Charles I was executed, Heywood fled London and lived in Wiltshire.
One of the few surviving chest tombs in Saint Giles Churchyard is the tomb of Richard Penderel, who sheltered King Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651.
The Puritan ministers were ejected from Saint Giles at the Restoration in 1660, and Heywood was re-instated. He was succeeded in 1663 by Dr Robert Boreman, another deprived Royalist, who is remembered for his bitter exchange with Richard Baxter, a leading Puritan and occasional parishioner of Saint Giles.
A number of Roman Catholic priests and laymen, executed for High Treason during the Titus Oates plot in 1681 were buried near the church’s north wall, including Archbishop Oliver Plunkett of Armagh, although his head is now in Drogheda and his body is at Downside Abbey, Somerset. All 12 were beatified by Pope Pius XI and Oliver Plunkett was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1975.
Meanwhile, John Sharp, who became the rector in 1675, was seen as bridging the post-restoration divisions within the Church of England. He spent 16 years reforming and reconstituting the parish, preached twice on Sundays, introduced a weekly Holy Communion and restored the Daily Offices in the church. After the Williamite Revolution, Sharp became the Dean of Canterbury in 1689, and Archbishop of York in 1691.
The high number of plague burials in and around the church may have caused the damp problems that emerged in the church by 1711, and the churchyard had risen as much as eight feet above the nave floor.
The parishioners petitioned the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches for a grant to rebuild the church. A new church was built in 1730-1734, and was designed by the architect Henry Flitcroft in the Palladian style. The first stone was laid by the Bishop of Norwich, William Baker, a former rector, on Michaelmas, 29 September 1731.
Flitcroft was inspired by the Caroline buildings of Inigo Jones rather than the works of Wren, Hawksmoor or James Gibbs, although his spire was modelled on the steeple by James Gibbs at Saint Martin’s in the Fields.
Flitcroft’s church represents a shift from the Baroque to the Palladian form in church architecture in England. It has been described as ‘one of the least known but most significant episodes in Georgian church design, standing at a crucial crossroads of radical architectural change and representing … the first Palladian Revival church to be erected in London.’ The Vestry House was built at the same time.
The East Window depicts the Transfiguration. The paintings of Moses and Aaron on either side of the altar are by Francisco Vieira the Younger, court painter to the King of Portugal.
The mosaic ‘Time, Death and Judgment’ by GF Watts was formerly in Saint Jude’s Church, Whitechapel. The cartoon for it was drawn by Cecil Schott and the mosaic was executed by Salviati.
The baptismal font, dating from 1810, is of white marble with Greek Revival details and is said to have been designed by Sir John Soane. William and Clara Everina Shelley, the children of the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, were baptised in the font on 9 March 1818, along with Allegra, the illegitimate daughter of Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont and the poet Lord Byron.
The haste in baptising these children is attributed to Shelley’s debts, his ill-health and his fears about the custody of his children, along with the desire to take Allegra to her father who was then in Venice. All three children were to die in childhood in Italy.
John Wesley is said to have preached occasionally at Evening Prayer in Saint Giles. In the east end of the north aisle is a small box pulpit from a chapel where both John and Charles Wesley preached. George Whitfield and John William Fletcher also preached from the same pulpit. The chapel later became All Saints’ Church, West Street, and when it closed the pulpit was moved to Saint Giles.
The Resurrection Gate at the west end of the churchyard facing Flitcroft Street is a grand lychgate in the Doric order. It once stood on the north side of the churchyard, where condemned prisoners would see it on their way to their execution at Tyburn. The gate is adorned with a bas-relief of the Day of Judgment, probably carved in 1686.
The gate was rebuilt in 1810 to designs by William Leverton. It was deemed unsafe in 1865, taken down and re-erected opposite the west door in anticipation of the re-routing of Charing Cross Road. But Charing Cross Road by-passed Flitcroft Street, and the gate now faces a narrow alley.
As the population of the area grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, no more room was available for burials in the graveyard, and many parishioners, including the architect Sir John Soane, were buried in the churchyard at Saint Pancras Old Church.
The architects Sir Arthur Blomfield and William Butterfield made minor alterations to the interior of the church in 1875 and 1896.
Most of the Victorian stained glass in Saint Giles was destroyed during World War II and the roof of the nave was severely damaged. The Vestry House was filled with rubble, the churchyard was fenced with chicken wire, and the Rectory on Great Russell Street was destroyed.
The Revd Gordon Taylor, who was appointed rector after the war, set about rebuilding the church and parish. The church was designated a Grade I listed building on 24 October 1951 and Gordon Taylor raised funds for a major restoration in 1952-1953, praised by Sir John Betjeman as ‘one of the most successful post-war church restorations’.
Taylor also rebuilt the congregation, refurbished the Saint Giles’s Almshouses and revived the ancient parochial charities. Despite the liturgical changes introduced in the 1960s, he maintained the use of the Book of Common Prayer.
Saint Giles is often known to as the ‘Poets’ Church’ because of its connections with several poets, dramatists, actors and translators, and the Poetry Society holds its annual general meeting in Saint Giles Vestry House.
An early post-reformation rector, Nathaniel Baxter, was a priest and poet, and was once a tutor to Sir Philip Sidney. He is the author of a lengthy philosophical poem ‘Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania’ (1606).
Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, who was buried at Saint Giles in 1648, was a brother of the priest-poet George Herbert and was a poet too.
George Chapman (1559-1634) published the first complete English translation of the works of Homer, and is the subject of John Keats’s sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Inigo Jones designed his memorial.
James Shirley and Thomas Nabbes are both buried in the churchyard, and the politician, pamphleteer, poet and MP Andrew Marvell was buried at Saint Giles in 1678.
The translator Sir Roger L’Estrange, who produced the first English translation of Aesop’s fables for children is buried at Saint Giles. L’Estrange also discovered and foiled the Rye House Plot in 1683. John Milton’s daughter Mary was baptised in Saint Giles in 1647 and L’Estrange is often remembered for his attempt to suppress lines from Book I of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for potentially impugning the king:
As when the Sun new ris’n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs
The 17th century organ was destroyed in the English Civil War. George Dallam built a replacement in 1678, which was rebuilt in 1699 by Christian Smith, a nephew of the organ builder ‘Father’ Smith. A second rebuilding was completed in 1734 by Gerard Smith the younger. The organ was rebuilt in 1856 and in 1960, and it was extensively restored by William Drake in 2006.
People with memorials in Saint Giles include: Luke Hansard, printer to the House of Commons; Thomas Earnshaw, watchmaker; Cecil Calvert, the first proprietor of Maryland; William Balmain, one of the founders of New South Wales; and John Coleridge Patteson, first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia and martyred, who is commemorated in the Church of England on 20 September.
Saint Giles-in-the-Fields is the custodian of the White Ensign flown by HMS Indefatigable at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay 80 years ago, on 5 September 1945.
Saint Giles is the patron of beggars, so it is appropriate the mission of Saint Giles gives a priority to the destitute and the homeless, and the church works with many homeless charities.
The Simon Community provides a weekly Street Café outside the church every Saturday and Sunday. Quaker Homeless Action provide a lending library at Saint Giles every Saturday for people who otherwise would not have access to books.
Saint Giles-in-the-Fields is a parish church in the Diocese of London, and is served by three clergy members and a licensed lay minister: the Revd Tom Sander has been the rector since 2021; the Revd Chris Smalling is an associate priest; the Revd Philip Dawson has been the curate since 2023; and Will James is a licensed lay minister. Jonathan Bunney is the Director of Music.
The two Sunday services are Sung Eucharist at 11 am and Evensong at 6:30 pm. The church is open daily for quiet prayer, with Morning Prayer every morning at 8:15 am, and said Holy Communion on Wednesdays at 1 pm. Saint Giles uses the Book of Common Prayer (1662) and the King James Bible, and the church is a corporate member of the Prayer Book Society. On the first Sunday in the month, the extended form of Sung Eucharist includes sung responses, Creed and Gloria.
The patronal Feast of Saint Giles is celebrated on the nearest Sunday to 1 September, and this year the feast is being celebrated today (Sunday 7 September 2025).
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