Patrick Comerford
In my recent self-guided ‘church crawling’ tours in London of churches in Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Soho, one of the unusual ones is the Church of Christ the King facing Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
The church was built for the Catholic Apostolic Church, an eclectic group that has faded into oblivion but that still exists on paper, and is used today by two by two different groups at polar opposites in Church of England, united by their opposition to the ordination of women and their narrow views on sexuality.
This church in Bloomsbury is of cathedral dimensions and is only 500 metres south of Euston station. I have been familiar with it from the outside for half a century or so but – until recent weeks – it has never seemed to be open.
It was open at lunchtime when I was in Bloomsbury a few weeks ago, and I took the opportunity to visit one part of the church, the English Chapel, which Forward in Faith describes as a ‘Place of Quiet Prayer and Reflection.’ I have yet to find the other part of the building, known as Euston Church, to be open when I am in that part of Bloomsbury.
The Church of Christ the King is beside the former Dr Williams’s Library, which closed earlier this year (2025), and it is close to University College London. The building belongs to the trustees of the Catholic Apostolic Church. But the building has been divided and segmented in recent years, with the former main part of the church now used by the Euston Church for Sunday services, while the former Lady Chapel or English Chapel at the east end is used by Forward in Faith for weekday services.
The church has been a Grade I listed building since 1954, one of the 129 churches in London with this listing.
The church was designed in the Early English Neo-Gothic style with a cruciform plan by John Raphael Rodrigues Brandon (1817-1877) for the Catholic Apostolic Church or ‘Irvingites’ in 1850-1854, and Brandon designed the interior in 1853.
The Catholic Apostolic Church, also known as the Irvingite Church, originated in London around 1831. Edward Irving (1792-1834), a former clergyman in the Church of Scotland, is sometimes credited with organising the movement. Their former church on Adelaide Road in Dublin is now a Lutheran Church.
John Raphael Rodrigues Brandon was a Gothic Revival architect and writer, and he carried out much in collaboration with his younger brother Joshua Arthur Rodrigues Brandon, until Joshua died in 1847. They were the sons of Joshua Rodrigues Brandon (1785-1864), a West India merchant from a prominent Sephardic family, and his wife Mary Anne Hunter (1786-1856). Both Raphael and Joshua Brandon were keen adherents of the Neo-Gothic style and they jointly produced a series of three works on Early English ecclesiastical architecture that became 19th century architectural pattern books.
The Brandon brother designed several stations and engine-houses in the style of mediaeval manor houses on the London and Croydon Railway, disguising chimneys as early Gothic church bell-towers. After Joshua died, Raphael Brandon went into partnership with Robert Ritchie until 1856.
Raphael Brandon’s other designs include Colchester Town Hall (1843-1845), which has since been replaced, and the restoration of Saint Martin's Church, Leicester, now Leicester Cathedral, in the 1860s, as well as the north aisle of Saint Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge.
Thomas Hardy worked briefly for Brandon, and based his description of Henry Knight’s chambers in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes on Brandon’s office at Clement’s Inn. Brandon also employed James Rawson Carroll (1830-1911), architect of the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital and the Mageough Home in Dublin and many works throughout the village of Ardagh in Co Longford.
Brandon’s church in Gordon Square is built of Bath stone, with a tiled roof. The structure is incomplete, lacking two bays on its liturgical west side, Brandon’s a planned façade and his planned crossing tower with a 150 ft spire. The tower base that was built has mostly blind arcading.
The cruciform plan is made up of a nave with full triforium and clerestory, side aisles, sanctuary and Lady Chapel. All of the exterior corners have octagonal corner turrets with gabled niches and terminating in spires with gablets. The façade has pinnacle buttresses and corbelled parapets.
The main entrance is at the east end, from Gordon Street, through a gabled porch with angle buttresses, with mouldings, a pointed-arch door and a two-light and oculus plate tracery window above the door. This entrance links onto the Lady Chapel through an octagonal turret and a two-light room. In addition, a north side entrance is approached by a cloister walk from the porch.
The five-bay nave is only 13 ft lower than the nave in Westminster Abbey. It has a gabled east façade with three large lancet windows below five smaller ones. Inside, it has a timber hammer beam roof with angels and central bosses of snowflake design, as well as a double-arcaded triforium. It also has a cathedra for the ‘angel’ or bishop of the Catholic Apostolic Church.
The crossing has roll-moulded arches on clustered columns. The transepts are gabled, with two layers of three lancets below a rose window. The south transept windows are the most notable. The lancets depict Christ in Majesty with ranks of saints, apostles and angels and earth below, while its rose window is by Archibald Keightley Nicholson, with a dove in the centre surrounded by musician angels and cherubim and seraphim.
The three-bay sanctuary has a roof with stone rib-vaulting and foliated bosses. The sanctuary lamp was designed by AWN Pugin.
The three-bay Lady Chapel or English Chapel, now used by Forward in Faith, is beyond this sanctuary, separated from it by a screen behind the high altar with open traceried window to the chapel. The chapel itself has a richly painted timber roof and stone angel along with an east façade with arcaded lancet windows below a small rose window and gable, along with gabled and pinnacled buttresses.
When the church was built in the early 1850s, it was criticised for what was seen as its lack of originality of design. Since then, however, it has been appreciated for the combination of 13th and 15th century Gothic precedents in its design, which indicate the extent to which the Brandon brothers had studied ecclesiastical architecture.
The church was opened on Christmas Eve 1853 as the ‘central cathedral’ of the Irvingites. Brandon donated the original oak tabernacle for the High Altar The altar, now in the English Chapel, is carved with three New Testament scenes: the Three Wise Men presenting gifts to the Christ Child; the Risen Christ at the supper in Emmaus; and the Ascension.
A Gray and Davison organ was installed in 1853, and the early organists included Edmund Hart Turpin (1835-1907).
The church was damaged during World War II but was restored in 1946. The East Window in the English Chapel depicting Christ the King (1948) is by Lilian Josephine Pocock (1883-1974), a stained glass artist as well as a theatrical costume designer, book illustrator and watercolourist who is closely associated with the work of Karl Parsons (1884-1934), who was a member of the church.
The chapel has 24 carved stone niches around its sides. Above them, Pocock’s window of Christ the King is complimented by a set of windows on the north and south sides by AE Buss for Goddard & Gibbs (1954).
From 1963 to 1994, it was known as the University Church of Christ the King and served the Anglican Chaplaincy to the universities and colleges of the Diocese of London. This new role was initiated on 6 October 1963 at the Eucharist, with Bishop Robert Stopford of London presiding and at Evensong, with Bishop JWC Wand preaching.
At the time, the poet Sir John Betjeman wrote much about the building and the need to preserve it intact. He spoke enthusiastically of its proportions, including the chapel behind the high altar which he referred to it as the ‘Apostles’ Chapel, which was renamed the ‘Lady Chapel’. The University Chaplaincy first called the building Christ the King after the figure of Christ the King in the central stained-glass window.
In practice, the church was a worship centre for students living in the university halls nearby. It was also a popular student venue, and the Crypt Café was run in the basement until 1992. Occasionally, the church was a venue for London-wide events, with a strong emphasis on music in worship under successive musical directors, including Ian Hall, Alan Wilson and Simon Over.
The memorial service for the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was held in the church on 6 December 1983.
The 25th anniversary of the role of the church in university chaplaincy was celebrated at a Thanksgiving Eucharist on 27 November 1988, with the Right Reverend Michael Marshall preaching. But this came to an end in the following years. The last chaplaincy Sunday service was held on 28 June 1992. The weekday celebrations of the Eucharist continued in the English Chapel until the last chaplaincy service on Ash Wednesday, 16 February 1994, with the Revd Alan Walker of the University of Westminster.
The Diocese of London surrendered its lease on the church to the trustees of Catholic Apostolic Church on 30 June 1994.
The Forward in Faith movement has used the Lady Chapel or English Chapel at the east end of the church since 1996, and has its offices at 2A The Cloisters. Forward in Faith was formed in 1992 in opposition to the ordination of women to the priesthood. In its early years, the movement had a number of evangelical members, but today its membership is overwhelmingly Anglo-Catholic.
The English Chapel is open from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with Morning Prayer at 9 am, Mass at 12:30 pm and Evening Prayer at 3 pm on those three days. The chaplain is Father Peter Hudson SSC.
Euston Church, a church plant from Saint Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate, started meeting in the church in September 2015. It began in 2010 with a church plant from Saint Helen’s, Bishopsgate, involving 40 people. It moved to Christ the King, Gordon Square, five years later. Sunday services are at 11 am, 3 pm and 5 pm, and it is also open when there is an organ recital, usually the Second Friday of the month at 1:10 pm, except August.
The Vicar, the Revd Kev Murdoch, trained at Oak Hill Theological College and Saint Mellitus College and on the Ministry Training Scheme at Saint Helen’s, Bishopsgate. Their website tells a lot about when tea and coffee and biscuits are served, but does not say when the Eucharist is celebrated.
Forward in Faith and Saint Helen’s, Bishopsgate, could be said to be at polar opposites of Anglican ecclesiology, liturgy and sacramental theology. Yet it seems appropriate that both groups, in their shared implacable opposition to the ordination to women that must appear to many as misogynist, share a church building that was once the pride of a curious but virtually moribund denomination that has been relegated to the footnotes of Victorian church history, and yet, at the same time, are separated from one another by a large dividing screen inserted in recent decades.
