Patrick Comerford
In my recent self-guided ‘church crawling’ tour of half a dozen or so churches and chapels in Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, Soho and Mayfair, one of the buildings I visited – though I was disappointed not to see inside – was the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street in Mayfair.
The Grosvenor Chapel, dating from the 1730s, is at the west end of the Mount Street Gardens, and so it is a close neighbour of Farm Street Church, at the east end of the gardens and which I was writing about two weeks ago (22 June 2025). Its architectural style has inspired many churches in New England, and it is a fashionable West End church, close to Park Lane, Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square.
The reputation of the Grosvenor Chapel as a fashionable church is reflected in its setting for the wedding at the start of the Richard Curtis film Love Actually. But I was more interested in seeing the Grosvenor Chapel because of its association with clergy such as Dick Sheppard and Charles Gore and literary figures such as Rose Macaulay and John Betjeman, and its reputation for its Anglo-Catholic liturgical tradition, enhanced by the work in the early 20th century by Sir Ninian Comper.
Those who have found a spiritual home in the Grosvenor Chapel include the radical politician and campaigner John Wilkes (1727-1797), the ‘Friend of Liberty’; the intrepid traveller and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), who introduced smallpox inoculation to England in 1718; Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington, and his wife Anne, parents of the Duke of Wellington; and Florence Nightingale.
The Grosvenor Chapel is in the heart of the Grosvenor Estate in West London. The foundation stone was laid on 7 April 1730 by Sir Richard Grosvenor (1689-1732), who owned the surrounding properties. He leased the site for 99 years at a peppercorn rent to a syndicate of four ‘undertakers’ led by Benjamin Timbrell, a local builder. The new building was completed and ready to use by April 1731. The organ was built by Abraham Jordan and installed in 1732 at the expense of Sir Richard Grosvenor.
When Grosvenor died in 1732, his title and estates were inherited by his brothers, Sir Thomas Grosvenor (1693-1732) and then Sir Robert Grosvenor (1695-1755), the ancestor of the Dukes of Westminster, who have owned the Grosvenor estate and much of Mayfair.
The simple classical form of the building, a plain rectangular box with two tiers of arched windows in the side walls, at the east a shallow projection for the Communion table or Altar and at the west a portico over the pavement and a short spire containing a clock and bell, is derived from recently completed churches such as Saint Martin in the Fields by James Gibbs or Saint George’s, Hanover Square, by John James. Timbrell had worked with Gibbs at Saint Martin’s, and produced the design for the chapel without commissioning an architect.
The modest brick exterior contains an elegant white-painted interior flooded with light from clear-glazed windows. It is roofed with a plaster barrel vault, and over the original site of the Altar or Communion Table (now the Lady Chapel) is an elaborate composition showing the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending in glory.
The galleries on three sides have box pews with high sides similar to those that were originally seen on the ground floor. The west gallery displays the royal arms of George II.
After the original 99-year lease ran out in 1829, the Grosvenor Chapel Act 1831 brought the chapel within the parochial system as a chapel of ease to Saint George’s, Hanover Square.
The font, dating from 1841, is a white marble bowl set on a fluted pillar. The furnishings were up-dated in 1871, when a new altar, now used in the Lady Chapel, was installed, the pulpit was moved from the middle to one side and reduced in height and the box pews were modified into the present lower benches.
The organ was altered twice in the 19th century by Bishop, and rebuilt in 1908 by Ingram. JW Walker & Sons built a new, two-manual organ in 1930, incorporating much second-hand pipework both from the old instrument and from other organs. That organ was replaced in 1991 when William Drake of Buckfastleigh, Devon, built a new organ in 1991.
The Anglo-Catholic liturgical style of the Grosvenor Chapel was reflected in the introduction of fittings and adornments by Sir Ninian Comper in 1912-1913. He converted what was a plain Georgian auditorium centred on the pulpit into a prayerful church in which attention is directed to the mystery of the altar.
Behind a screen of Ionic columns, the original sanctuary forms a Lady Chapel where the pedimented reredos remains, its panels once painted with the Ten Commandments, with the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer at each side, and now covered by rich fabric. The Blessed Sacrament has been reserved there since 1921 in a hanging pyx held aloft by an angel appearing to have alighted through the clear glass of the east window.
Comper brought the iron Georgian Communion rails forward to enclose a new sanctuary within which the High Altar stands against the screen. It is flanked by two Corinthian columns intended to carry a canopy that was never completed.
The giant Ionic columns at each side set the scale for colonnades that were to run the whole length of the building, replacing the gallery columns. They carry a beam on which stands the rood with the Crucified Christ, with the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist. Two angels kneel below with chalices to gather Christ’s blood. The three stained glass windows in the south wall are also by Comper, and two include his trademark strawberry motif.
Comper intended to rebuild the whole chapel in the style of an early Christian basilica in Rome, with giant columns down the nave, but only the chancel got built. As a reviewer on the site Ship of Fools said, ‘money, it seems, is short sometimes, even in Mayfair’.
The Anglo-Catholic tradition in the Grosvenor Chapel was established by the Revd Hugh Richard Lawrie Sheppard (1880-1937), who was at the Grosvenor Chapel until 1914, when he became the Vicar of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square (1914-1926), and then Dean of Canterbury (1929-1931). Canon Dick Sheppard was a leading pacifist in the years immediately before World War II. He was the author of the influential War We Say No (1935) and a founding figure in the Peace Pledge Union (1936), and he was involved in the formation of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship shortly before he died.
The Anglo-Catholic tradition continued with Dick Sheppard’s successors, and was firmly underpinned by the liberal Catholicism of Bishop Charles Gore (1853-1932), who assisted and preached there often during his last decade of his life. Gore had been the first Principal of Pusey House and later bishop in succession of Worcester, the new diocese of Birmingham, and of Oxford.
Bishop Gore was one of the most influential Church leaders and thinkers in England in those days. During his time, the appeal of the chapel was broadened beyond the residents of Mayfair, and he was an honorary curate at the Grosvenor Chapel after he retired as Bishop of Birmingham.
During World War II, men and women of the US armed forces in London were welcomed to the chapel for their Sunday services.
In the years after the war, the congregation regularly included literary figures such as the writer Rose Macaulay, author of The Towers of Trebizond, and the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman.
The chapel has a high standard of music with a resident professional group of five singers and an organist. The choir performs a large range of music from Renaissance to the present day, and there are regular lunchtime concerts on Tuesdays at 1:10.
Liddon House, which owes its origins to Charles Gore, is based at the Grosvenor Chapel and holds public lectures throughout the year and monthly evening meetings for graduates and young professionals to discuss questions of faith in the context of contemporary society. It is named after Henry Parry Liddon (1829-1890), an influential Oxford theologian a key figure in the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic movements.
The senior priest at the Grosvenor Chapel was known as the Curate-in-Charge until 2006, and then as the Priest-in-Charge. Recent priests there include Canon Mark Oakley, later Dean of Saint John’s College, Cambridge, and now Dean of Southwark.
‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican,’ is one of John Betjeman’s four poems – alongside ‘Churchyards,’ ‘Advent 1955,’ and ‘Christmas’ – in which he makes the mystery of the Christian faith a central issue.
Kevin J Gardner, in Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An Anthology of Betjeman’s Religious Verse (Continuum, 2006), says that in these four poems Betjeman finds the sudden and wondrous appearance of God in the most unlikely of places, giving him ‘a sense of spiritual security and renders him susceptible to the embrace of mystery and miracle.’
If Betjeman’s imagination wanders in the joys of the beauty of worship and church architecture in ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge,’ then his mind wanders in the joys of beauty in a very different way in ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’ – although he reaches similar conclusions.
‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’ – which in Betjeman’s drafts is titled ‘Lenten Thoughts in Grosvenor Chapel’ – was the first spontaneous poem he wrote after his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972. It was first published in the Sunday Express on 13 May 1973, and was included in the collection A Nip in the Air (1974).
Alongside the joviality found in many of his poems, this poem has an unusual tonal complexity. Betjeman describes a mysterious and sexually alluring woman who receives Holy Communion each Sunday. In an attempt to refocus the devotional attention of the parishioners, the priest tells them not to stare around or to be distracted during his celebration of the Eucharist.
But Betjeman’s experience contradicts the admonitions from the priest. In a peculiar way, through this mysterious and alluring woman, he suddenly becomes aware of the presence of God. The intrigue and arousal surrounding the women he describes as the ‘mistress’ speaks to the poet of the mystery of God.
Betjeman told Tom Driberg that ‘this [poem] is about a lady I see but have never spoken to, in a London church.’ The church was the Grosvenor Chapel, where Betjeman worshipped from 1972 until his death in 1984.
In an interview with the Sunday Express, Betjeman said: ‘I saw this woman in church one Sunday. I didn’t know who she was. She was the most beautiful creature; and she had a slightly sad expression. And I didn’t even know her name – but it was probably all the better for that. She might have been terrible.’
‘I like there to be a mystery between me and my beloved,’ he continued. ‘And I don’t think there was anything wrong with looking at her in church, do you? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with loving the beauty of the human figure whether it’s in church or in the street … I’m not sure if [the poem] is any good but I hope it will please people. I’ve always wanted my verse to be popular because I wanted to communicate.’
Betjeman’s Dublin-born daughter, the author and journalist Candida Lycett Green, later identified the woman who inspired this poem as Joan Price, who also attended the Grosvenor Chapel. She was the Beauty Editor of Harpers & Queen – now Harper’s Bazaar – and was married to Michael Constantinidis, a sidesmen at the Grosvenor Chapel.
Joan Constantinidis died on 12 January 2020, and her funeral took place at the Grosvenor Chapel.
Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman
Isn’t she lovely, “the Mistress”?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?
How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,
How expensive they are as well!
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell.
But why do I call her “the Mistress”
Who know not her way of life?
Because she has more of a cared-for air
Than many a legal wife.
How elegantly she swings along
In the vapoury incense veil;
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.
The parson said that we shouldn’t stare
Around when we come to church,
Or the Unknown God we are seeking
May forever elude our search.
But I hope that the preacher will not think
It unorthodox and odd
If I add that I glimpse in “the Mistress”
A hint of the Unknown God.
• Father Stephen Coleman has been the Priest-in-Charge of the Grosvenor Chapel since November 2023. The Revd Dr Alan Piggot, the Assistant Priest, works full-time at Church House as a Statistical Researcher. The Sung Eucharist is at 11 am on Sundays. The chapel is normally open to visitors Monday to Friday, 8 am to 2:30 pm.
