Patrick Comerford
Saint Mary’s Church on Eversholt Street, halfway between Euston Station and Camden High Street, has been covered in scaffolding and corrugated fencing for a long time now and is on the ‘high risk’ register of English Heritage.
But the church, which was built 200 years ago, is part of the story of Somers Town, an area that once had some of the worst slum housing in London, and is forever associated with the work of Father Basil Jellicoe, one of the pioneering Anglo-Catholic ‘slum priests’ in London the early 20th century.
The slums expanded as the railway stations at Euston and King’s Cross opened in the 19th century. As time moved on, living standards in the area stagnated. Somers Town is also the location for a number of significant films, including the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1956), with Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers; Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986), starring Bob Hoskins; and Shane Meadows’s Somers Town (2008), filmed around Phoenix Court in Purchese Street.
Eversholt Street was originally the name of only the northern part of the street above Cranleigh Street, formerly Johnson Street, which is on the Bedford Estate. The portion in Somers Town includes the former Upper Seymour Street and the part of Seymour Street north of Drummond Crescent. The lower part continues south to the Euston Road immediately east of Euston Station.
Saint Mary’s Church was built as Saint Mary’s Chapel in 1824-1827 as a chapel of ease for Saint Pancras Old Church on what was then Upper Seymour Street. At an early stage it was known as ‘Seymour Street Chapel’ or ‘Mr Judkin’s Chapel’, referring to its first priest, the hymnwriter and painter the Revd Thomas James Judkin (1788-1871).
The church was designed by Henry William Inwood (1794-1843) and his father William Inwood (1771-1843), and was built by IT Seabrook in 1824-1827. Henry William Inwood was an architect, archaeologist, classical scholar and writer. Father and son are best known as the joint architects of Saint Pancras New Church (1819-1822), where their design was inspired by classical Greece, using elements from the Erechtheum, especially the caryatids, and the Tower of the Winds in Athens.
The Inwoods collaborated on two other Greek Revival churches in the parish of Saint Pancras: All Saints’ Church, Camden Town (1822-1824) and Saint Peter’s Church, Regent Square (1822-1825, now demolished). Both father and son died within four days of each other in 1843.
Saint Mary’s was built in what was described as a naive ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ style. A parliamentary grant paid for the construction and local taxes funded the purchase of the site and for the interior decoration.
Saint Mary’s was consecrated on 11 March 1826. The Revd William Stephen Gilly (1789-1855) attended as the minister, but apparently he seldom preached there. Soon after its consecration, Saint Mary’s attracted some notoriety as the scene of the vaunted conversion of many people in the neighbourhood from Roman Catholicism. The church also became known as the ‘Cabbies’ Church’, serving the cabbies of the horse-drawn cabs that queued up at Euston Station and their families.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the architect of the Gothic Revival in England and Ireland, satirised Saint Mary’s, comparing it with Bishop Skirlaw’s Chapel at Skirlaugh, Yorkshire, built in 1401-1405 by Walter de Skirlaw when he was the Bishop of Durham. Yet the architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner later described the chapel as ‘a perfect piece of Perpendicular architecture’.
Charles Dickens went to church in Saint Mary’s during his schooldays when his family was living nearby at Cranleigh Street. Owen P Thomas, a schoolfellow at the Classical and Commercial Academy on Hampstead Road, relates how he and Dickens ‘very piously attended the morning service at Seymour Street Chapel.’
Saint Mary’s was built as a plain preaching box in an elegant Gothic style. It has a central tower, prominent pinnacles and a row of 12 windows along the north side. The church has slate pitched roofs and brick walling with stone dressings. Inside, elegant cast iron columns support Gothic style arches, and the ceiling has rib vaulting.
Three schemes reshaped the interior of Saint Mary’s in the 19th century: it was decorated by JK Colling in 1874; the chancel was added by Ewan Christian in 1888, when the side galleries were removed; and in 1890 by RC Reade inserted traceried transoms in the windows and the west gallery was taken out.
The High Altar and reredos date from 1915 and are by the sculptor Mary Grant (1831-1908), who also sculpted the figures on the West Door of Lichfield Cathedral. The Calvary in Saint Mary’s, originally from Saint Mary’s Church, Charing Cross Road, is also her work. It was moved to Somers Town in the early 1910s, and has been restored recently.
Father Basil Jellicoe was Missioner at the Magdalen College Mission which was run from Saint Mary’s in the 1920s and 1930s. His ground-breaking work in the Saint Pancras Housing Association cleared the area’s slums and tackled the causes of poverty.
The Revd John Basil Lee Jellicoe (1899-1935) was the eldest son of Bethia Theodora and the Revd Thomas Harry Lee Jellicoe (1861-1943), the Rector of Saint Peter’s Chailey and a cousin of John Jellicoe (1859-1935), 1st Earl Jellicoe. He was educated at Haileybury and Magdalen College, Oxford, and during World War I he was with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. He then studied at Saint Stephen’s House, Oxford, and was ordained in 1922.
Jellicoe became Missioner at the Magdalen College Mission, the outreach arm of Magdalen College, based at Saint Mary’s. When he arrived in Somers Town, the slums near Euston and King’s Cross had expanded and grown and it was an area of exceptional overcrowding and poverty. He believed people should see God’s work in action in their lives, and his great concern was that Christianity should be about showing people God loves them and they should have the right to decent lives.
In his crusade for slum clearance, he founding the St Pancras House Improvement Society, later the St Pancras Housing Association, in 1924. For many years it was run by Irene Barclay (1894-1989), a campaigner for social housing and the first woman to qualify as a chartered surveyor.
The association built high-quality homes at decent rents the people who were living in the slums and could to afford to rent the new properties. He commissioned ceramic decorations by Gilbert Bayes that continue to adorn some of the buildings where the slums used to be.
On one occasion, he theatrically burned paper mâché representations of vermin. He became the landlord of a local pub when he opened the Anchor in Chalton as a ‘reformed pub’ in 1929. The first drinks were served to the then-Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang.
Basil Jellicoe also founded several other housing associations in East London, St Marylebone, Kensington, Sussex and Cornwall. He toured England in his small car fundraising and selling loan stock to fund his housing projects.
He was at the Magdalen College Mission and curate of Saint Mary Somers Town until 1934, when he became the curate of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, where Canon William Patrick Glyn (‘Pat) McCormick (1877-1940) had succeeded Canon Dick Shepherd as Vicar.
But, while he was improving the lives of others, Basil Jellicoe allowed his own health to suffer and probably worked himself to death. When he died in Uxbridge on 24 August 1935 he was only 36. He is commemorated in the Diocese of London with a memorial day on 24 August. The annual Jellicoe Sermon at Magdalen College is named in his honour, and his work continues to the present.
After World War II, when much of the church building had fallen into disrepair, the interior was redecorated and refurbished in a simpler style. Saint Mary’s was designated a Grade II listed building in 1954.
Reflecting the new liturgical emphases from the 1970s on, Saint Mary’s was one of the first churches in London to decide to celebrate the Mass using the westward position, facing the people.
The church provided a safe haven for women who worked in the area in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was known as a red light district.
Saint Mary’s has been the spiritual centre of Somers Town for almost two centuries. But during work at the vicarage in 2022, serious structural faults were found at in the church, and these were confirmed in detailed studies by stonemasons, architects and structural engineers.
Saint Mary’s was temporarily closed in June 2022 and reopened in September 2022. Protective scaffolding was erected in 2023 to catch falling masonry. The roofs are in poor condition along with the gutters, flashings and rainwater goods. There is water staining internally, along with dampness at a low level. Areas of stone are decayed and past repairs using cement are becoming detached.
The parishioners were told in December 2023 the church could be demolished because of its crumbling disrepair. Today it remains wrapped in scaffolding and corrugated fences amid concerns about falling masonry.
The scaffolding and fencing cost £100,000 a year, and when Saint Mary’s exhausted its own funds, the Diocese of London agreed to bear this cost, but stated this is not an indefinite solution. Estimates suggest it could take £1.7 million to repair the building fully, including £1.2 million for immediate repairs to the stonework and cement, and another £500,000 is needed for urgent repairs to the roof, electrics and heating. The key priorities involve restoring the stonework, removing the costly scaffolding, decorating the porch after a leak repair, replacing the roof and installing a sustainable heating system.
The demolition of the church would be a drastic step that would mean the end for a church that has served generations of families since it was consecrated in 1826.
Since 2003, Saint Mary’s has been part of a team of four parishes that includes Saint Michael’s Church, Camden Town, Saint Pancras Old Church and Saint Paul’s Church, Camden Square, as one parish with four districts. Father Paschal Worton, a former Franciscan friar and missionary in Zimbabwe, is the parish priest of Saint Mary’s.
The Magdalen Club is named after the Magdalen College Mission, which came to Saint Mary’s in 1908. The Magdalen Centre recalls the parish’s longstanding commitment to the local community. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Magdalen Centre hosts a drop-in for young families from the local area between 1 and 3 pm.
In the winter months, Saint Mary’s joins with other churches in the area to host C4WS, a local charity providing shelter for the homeless, as well as helping people to find work and permanent housing.
The regular services at Saint Mary’s include the Parish Mass at 11 am and Benediction at 5 pm on Sundays, and weekday Masses at 11 am on Tuesdays, 6 pm on Thursdays, 1:05 pm on Fridays and 10:30 on Saturdays. Benediction at 5 pm on Sundays is described as ‘a gentle half-hour with Jesus, as he comes to us in love in the Blessed Sacrament’, with prayers, hymns, contemplation and silence. Tuesday morning Masses are followed by coffee and conversation.
