29 January 2018

Theodolites and theology
at Saint Katharine’s
in London’s East End

The gardens and the former Georgian Vicarage of Saint James, Ratcliff, at the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

A team of surveyors has been going around the buildings and grounds in the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine in the East End of London, measuring the rooms and the corridors for a survey. I suppose you could say this is some heady mixture – theodolites and theology – while I am here for a two-day a residential meeting of the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel USPG).

I was last here over a year ago for a similar two-day residential meeting in November 2016.

I arrived back this morning at Saint Katharine’s, which stands at the East End crossroads connecting the communities of Stepney, Shadwell and Limehouse, close to the site of the old docks. It is just a few steps from Cable Street, the scene of a famous street battle over 80 years ago between Oswald Moseley’s fascists and the East End communities who protected the local Jewish people against racist taunts and assaults in 1936.

Saint Katharine’s offers a place of transforming calm for visitors who are in London on a short stay, on a business trip, or for a personal retreat and who find this is a unique alternative to London hotels.

Despite these busy two days, this is a relaxing place to stay, with a peaceful environment. The garden is home to undisturbed wildlife, with blackbirds, wood pigeons in the sheltered spaces. In the rose garden, there is a rose bush planted by Queen Elizabeth II during her last visit. This setting is enhanced by the lounge, conservatory, garden and small library.

The Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine’s dates back to 1147, when it was founded by Queen Matilda. Since then, this has been a centre for worship, hospitality and service for many centuries.

Originally known as Saint Katharine’s by the Tower, it has been a mediaeval church, hospital and centre of Saint Katharine’s precinct, a liberty housing over 2,000 people. It once had its own courts, prisons, factories and breweries and prisons.

Saint Katharine’s by the Tower – its full name was the Royal Hospital and Collegiate Church of Saint Katharine by the Tower – was a mediaeval church and hospital next to the Tower of London. The church was a royal peculiar and the precinct around it was an extra-parochial area, eventually becoming a civil parish that was dissolved in 1895.

Saint Katharine’s was founded in 1147 by Queen Matilda, the wife of King Stephen, in memory of two of her children, Baldwin and Matilda, who died in infancy and were buried in the Priory Church of Holy Trinity at Aldgate.

The endowment was increased by two Queens of England, Eleanor of Castile, who gave a gift of manors, and Philippa of Hainault. After a dispute over its control, Queen Eleanor granted a new charter in 1273, reserving the patronage of the Foundation to the Queens of England.

This was a religious community and mediaeval hospital for poor infirm people next to the Tower of London. The foundation included a Master, six ‘poor clerks’ or priests, three brethren, three sisters and a beadswoman. Unusually for that time, the brothers and sisters had equal rights.

For 678 years, the Foundation carried on its work in East London. In the 15th century, its musical reputation rivalled that of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and in 1442 it was granted a Charter of Privileges. This charter made Saint Katharine’s and its precinct, extending to 23-acre (93,000 square metre) a Liberty with its own prison, officers and court, all outside the ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction of the City of London.

Its status as a Liberty and the fact that it was personally owned and protected by the Queen Mother, meant that Saint Katharine’s was saved from being dissolved along with other monastic houses at the Reformation.

By the 16th century, there were 1,000 houses, including a brewery in the precinct, where the residents included foreigners, vagabonds and prostitutes. These people were crammed into houses along narrow lanes that had names such as Dark Entry, Cat’s Hole, Shovel Alley, Rookery and Pillory Lane. Many were in poor repair, and John Stow’s Survey of London in 1598 described them as ‘small tenements and homely cottages, having as inhabitants, English and strangers [i.e. foreigners], more in number than some city in England.’

The restrictions and rules of the London City guilds did not apply here, and so foreign craftsmen were attracted to the Liberty, along with many seamen and rivermen. Despite this high population density, the mortality rate in the Liberty during the Great Plague was half of the rate in areas to the north and east of the City of London.

The continuing establishment of lay brothers and sisters seems to have drawn hostile attention from extreme Protestants, and during the Gordon Riots in 1780 Saint Katharine’s was saved from being burned down by the mob.

In 1825, commercial pressure for larger docks up-river led to Saint Katharine’s, with its 14th and 15th century buildings and some 3,000 inhabitants, being demolished to provide a dock close to the heart of the City. The land was excavated and flooded to form a new dock. This was the smallest of London’s docks and was named Saint Katharine Docks.

There was some opposition to the demolition of an ancient establishment. But many others welcomed the demolition of ‘some of the most insanitary and unsalutary dwellings in London.’

Saint Katharine’s by the Tower was grouped into the Whitechapel District in 1855 and became a civil parish in 1866 when its extra-parochial status ended, following the Poor Law Amendment Act 1866. The parish became part of the County of London in 1889. In 1895 it was abolished as a parish and combined with Saint Botolph without Aldgate.

Meanwhile, the institution, now called the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine’s, moved to Regent’s Park, where it took the form of almshouses, and continued for 125 years.

After World War II, Saint Katharine’s finally moved back to its spiritual home in the East End in 1948, moving onto the site in Limehouse once occupied by Saint James’s Church, Ratcliff, which had been destroyed in the Blitz. It was just a mile from the original site, and the former chapel at Regent’s Park later became the Danish Seamen’s Church.

The foundation was housed in the Georgian vicarage and over time a new complex has grown up around it, carefully built to preserve the sense of an oasis in the city.

In Limehouse, Saint Katharine’s became a retreat house with Father St John Groser, the revolutionary Anglo-Catholic slum priest, as Master. A decade earlier, he had played a significant role in the defence of Cable Street in 1936. He was joined by members of the Community of the Resurrection from Mirfield in providing worship and service in the area, and the foundation remained under the care of the Community of the Resurrection for 45 years until 1993.

In 2004, Saint Katharine’s modernised and expanded its facilities to include a retreat and conference centre, so making available its hospitality more widely within the Church of England and to other churches, charities, voluntary and public sector bodies and to associated individuals.

The re-ordered chapel is normally the centrepiece of retreat and reflection, and is gracefully knitted into the fabric connecting the Georgian house with the retreat and conference centre. However, it is closed throughout this January and February while the lighting is being refitted and the chapel is redecorated.

In 2014, the Foundation opened Saint Katharine’s Precinct, a community project made entirely from shipping containers and yurts that will be recycled at the end of the project. The new facilities include a Well-being Hub, London’s first Yurt café and reflective space and artist studios in partnership with Bow Arts.

The Foundation is committed to Worship, Hospitality and Service. The vast majority of meetings and conferences here benefit from subsidised rates for Church-based organisations and for the not-for-profit sector, and thousands of people stay here each year during conferences, on personal retreats, or as an alternative to busy London hotels.

The Foundation is ranked 5 out of 949 places to stay in London as part of the ‘speciality lodgings’ category on Tripadvisor and rated 4.5 of 5 at TripAdvisor. It was recently included in Alastair Sawday’s ‘Special Places to Stay.’

The cloister-like passage linking the Chapel at the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine with the former vicarage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

A street photograph taken
in Bologna becomes part
of Holocaust Memorial Day

Via Mario Finzi, named in honour of a Jewish hero of the resistance in Bologna … the closing photograph in a new film to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Holocaust Memorial Day was marked in Ireland yesterday [28 January 2018] with many public ceremonies, and it was one of the themes in my Sunday sermons in both Castletown Church and Holy Trinity Church, Rathkeale.

At the same time, the World Jewish Congress was in Bologna to participate in yesterday’s ‘Run for Mem,’ a commemoration run through Jewish sites in the city for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a run to bring the community together toward the future.

The city’s Jewish community has been in Bologna since mediaeval times and has also experienced tragedy in modern times.

To mark that occasion, a special video, ‘The Jews of Bologna,’ was produced, and it concludes with a photograph I took in Bologna two months of the street sign on Via Mario Finzi. This is the street where Bologna’s main synagogue stands, and it was named after Mario Finzi (1913-1945), a hero of the resistance who is named on the Holocaust memorial on the façade of the synagogue.



Bologna’s main synagogue was destroyed in 1943 during World War II. But the synagogue was rebuilt ten years later by Guido Muggia, the son of the original architect, and was dedicated in 1953.

For the first time, the façade – albeit on a side street – was visible to the public. For security reasons, the entrance to the synagogue is through the Community Centre at the back. But the façade of the synagogue can be seen on Via Mario Finzi.

The street is just three minutes’ walk west of Piazza Maggiore in the heart of the historic centre of Bologna. Originally named Vicolo Tintinaga, it was renamed in honour of Mario Finzi, who was a Jewish magistrate and judge and a talented musician.

Finzi was born in Bologna in 1913, the son of teachers. He was a talented musician and pianist, and was already a magistrate and a judge at the age of 24. He began his legal career in Milan in 1938, but he was soon hampered by the Fascist racist laws promulgated that year. He then moved to Paris, where he dedicated himself totally to a life as a musician, working as a pianist on a contract with French Radio.

When World War II broke out, Finzi was back in Italy renewing his French visa and found he could not return to Paris … nor could he resume work as a lawyer or a magistrate in his own home country.

He began teaching at the Jewish school in Bologna, and in 1940-1943 he was active in a Jewish organisation assisting Jewish refugees in Italy. Soon he was directly involved in helping hundreds of Jewish orphans from Germany and the Balkans to find shelter, and he was at Venice station to welcome the first train of young refugees from Croatia.

On several occasions, he cycled all the way from Bologna to Venice to visit the children, to play with them and to play the piano for them.

When Nazi Germany occupied Italy after 8 September 1943, Finzi continued in his underground activities helping persecuted Jews, helping to smuggle children into Switzerland, and procuring false Italian identity cards for Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians and others.

Finzi was arrested on 31 March 1944. He was on his way to a local hospital to pay for the stay of a sick Jewish boy. At first he was detailed in Bologna in the jail at San Giovanni al Monte and then in the Fossoli concentration camp, before he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.

According to Eliakim Cordoval, a Jew from Rhodes who helped him, Finzi died because of a grave intestinal infection on 22 February 1945, almost a month before the camp was liberated. Another version says Finzi threw himself on the high-tension wire surrounding the camp, leaving behind a message asking his parents for their forgiveness.

His name is kept alive in Bologna today on the pedestrianised street where Bologna’s main synagogue stands. And it was an honour to have my photograph from the street used as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations in Bologna yesterday.

Mario Finzi’s name is on the Holocaust memorial on the façade of the synagogue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

A plaque on a ‘lost local’
recalls Samuel Johnson’s
return visits to Lichfield

The site of the former Three Crowns on Breadmarket Street … a ‘lost local’ in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

Like Samuel Johnson, I find myself constantly returning to Lichfield, and staying in a variety of places. For Dr Johnson, they were return visits to the place he had born; for me, they are return visits to the place that nurtured me spiritually in my late teens and shaped and formed by spirituality and my Anglicanism.

Like Samuel Johnson, I find myself staying in a variety of places, and last week I stayed in the Hedgehog Vintage Inn on the northern fringes of Lichfield, in a semi-rural setting on the corner of Stafford Road and Cross in Hand Lane.

One of the places where Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) often stayed on his return visits is the former Three Crown Inns, one of Lichfield’s lost pubs, which once stood at 7-9 Breadmarket Street, next door to the birthplace of the man who is, perhaps, Lichfield’s greatest literary figures.

A plaque on the site of the former Three Crowns on Breadmarket Street remembers Samuel Johnson’s return visits to Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

During his many return visits, Johnson frequently stayed at the Three Crowns, which he described in 1763 as ‘not one of the great inns, but a good old fashioned one.’

A plaque on the wall recalls:

Dr Johnson frequently stayed here during his many visits to Lichfield. In 1776 he was accompanied by Boswell, who described him as ‘now monarchising with no fewer than three crowns over his royal brow’.

This three-storey Georgian building dates from the early 18th century, although there are many later alterations. Indeed, there may have been an earlier inn on this site, as the name Three Crowns refers not to the papal tiara but to the three crowns of England, Ireland and Scotland which were brought together in the early 17th century when James VI of Scotland was crowned James I in 1603.

The Three Crowns appears on Snape’s map of Lichfield in 1781, three years before Samuel Johnson died. The earliest known masonic lodge in Lichfield was formed around the corner at the Scales Inn in Market Street on 10 March 1784 and it became a ‘Moderns Lodge’ when it was constituted as Lodge of Unity on 24 July 1787 at the Three Crowns Inn on Breadmarket Street. The lodge had closed by 1811.

Meanwhile, the Three Crowns continued to be run by members of the Cato family for almost 80 years: by Joseph Cato from 1793 to 1834, and by his son John Joseph Cato from 1834 to 1859.

This has been a Grade II listed building since 1952. The notable features include the central carriageway, the paired doors, and the 20th century shop front in traditional style.

The last landlord was probably John Barber, and the Three Crowns closed for the last time in the 1960s.

The former inn is now divided into shops and offices, including a branch of the Yorkshire Building Society and the Coffee House – until recently a shopfront for the Lichfield Mercury – and Devot-Tea. A coffee shop and a tea shop, in their own ways, I suppose, continue the hospitality traditions of the original Three Crowns, and Samuel Johnson, of all people, knew the importance of a coffee shop.

Recently, the premises featured in City Life in Lichfield in October 2016 in a feature ‘A window on the past: the lost locals of Lichfield’ with a collection of photographs from the local history group ‘You’re probably from Lichfield Staffs if …’

Additional reading:

John Shaw, The Old Pubs of Lichfield (Lichfield: George Lane Publishing, 2001/2007).

Neil Coley, Lichfield Pubs (Stroud: Amberley, 2016).

Continuing a tradition of welcome and hospitality … the former Three Crowns Inn on Breadmarket Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)