Dr Williams’s Library leaves Bloomsbury after serving theologians and church historians for 300 years

Dr Williams’s Library first opened in 1730 and was on Gordon Square from 1890 until it closed in 2025 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

It is always sad to see a library – particularly a library with a large collection related to theology, church history and religious studies – to close or to move away and to find it is no longer be accessible.

For over a century, Dr Williams’s Library was in Bloomsbury, where it was housed in the former University Hall on the west side of Gordon Square, beside the former Catholic Apostolic Church, now the Church of Christ the King. But the library closed within the past two years, and the collection has been moved to Manchester.

From 1890 until it closed in 2025, Dr Williams’s Library was housed in University Hall, built in 1848 to designs by the architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1795-1885), a pioneer in architectural education, a co-founder and President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a winner of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

Donaldson was born nearby at 8 Bloomsbury Square, the eldest son of the architect James Donaldson (c 1756-1843). His maternal uncle, the architect Thomas Leverton (1743-1824), is said to have designed the south range of Bedford Square.

After attending King Edward Grammar School, St Albans, Donaldson trained as an architect and travelled widely. He found a clerical job at the Cape of Good Hope before joining an expedition to attack the French-owned island of Mauritius. He visited Italy and Greece in 1818-1823 with John Lewis Wolfe and WW Jenkins. Back in London, he joined his father’s practice and designed 4 Hamilton Place for Richard Bingham (1764-1839), 2nd Earl of Lucan, who had extensive estates in Co Mayo.

Donaldson’s first significant work was Holy Trinity Church, Brompton (1826-1829), in South Kensington. With Jacques Ignace Hittorff and Charles Robert Cockerell, he was a member of the committee formed in 1836 to determine whether the Parthenon or Elgin Marbles and other Greek statuary in the British Museum had originally been coloured.

Donaldson reworked substantial sections of the Wilkins building at University College London (UCL) and designed the Flaxman Gallery and library buildings. He also designed All Saints’ Church, Gordon Street (1842, closed 1909, destroyed by bombing 1940) and was involved in the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Donaldson pioneered the academic study of architecture and in 1841 he became the first Professor of Architecture at University College London, a post he held until 1865. He was a co-founder of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1834, was its honorary secretary until 1839, then its foreign secretary for another 20 years.

He designed the institute’s Mycenaean lions medal with the motto Usui civium, decori urbium. He was awarded the institute’s royal gold medal in 1851 and was its president in 1863-1864. He was described by the Prince of Wales in 1879 as ‘the father of the Institute and of the profession’.

Thomas Leverton Donaldson designed the former library on Gordon Square as University Hall in 1848 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Donaldson designed the one-time library on Gordon Square as a Hall of Residence for students of University College London, following an architectural competition. It was built in stone and brick in the late Gothic style in 1848-1849. It was built as University Hall to mark the passing of the Dissenters’ Chapels Act in 1844.

From 1853, University Hall was shared with Manchester New College. Henry Morley, professor of literature at University College and editor of Morley’s Universal Library was the principal of University Hall in 1882-1890.

Manchester New College acquired the lease in 1882 but moved to Oxford in 1890, the building was bought by the trustees of Dr Williams’s Charity to house their library.

The Revd Dr Daniel Williams (1643-1716), a leading nonconformist minister in Dublin and London, endowed the library in his will

The founder of the library, the Revd Dr Daniel Williams (1643-1716), was a leading nonconformist minister in both Dublin and London in the late 17th and early 18th century.

Williams was born into a Welsh family, probably in Wrexham, and his early plans to enter ministry were interrupted by the Restoration of Charles II and the Act of Uniformity (1662). After a few years preaching in England he moved to Ireland, where he was a domestic chaplain to Mary (Chambré) Brabazon, Countess of Meath in 1664-1667.

Williams was then one of the ministers of the Wood Street Chapel, near Whitefriar Street in Dublin, for 20 years, from 1667 to 1687. The chapel had its roots in early Puritans and Presbyterians and became one of the Dublin congregations that lead to the formation of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Unitarian Church in Dublin.

As religious tensions heightened in Dublin during the reign of James II, Williams believed his life was in danger. He fled to London in 1687, and soon found an influential place amongst London Presbyterians, particularly after the death of Richard Baxter (1615-1691).

He was appointed minister to the Presbyterian congregation in Hand Alley, Bishopsgate, and despite repeated requests to return to Dublin, he remained at Hand Alley for the rest of his life. He received the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1709 from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in recognition of his outstanding services to nonconformity.

Williams died at the age of 72 in January 1716 and was buried in Bunhill Fields. His congregation eventually moved towards Unitarianism, but has long since disappeared.

In his will, he left instructions for his trustees to house his collection as a public library for nonconformist ministers, tutors and students in the City of London. He also left bequests to Saint Thomas’s Hospital, the University of Harvard, and to support missionaries in Scotland, Ireland, and New England.

His trustees built and equipped a library that first opened in Red Cross Street, Cripplegate, almost 300 years ago in 1730. Over the years, the collections were enlarged with gifts of books, manuscripts and portraits. His original benefaction of about 7,600 books became a small part of a library that eventually extended beyond Puritanism to include Biblical subjects, church history, Byzantine studies, philosophy, literature and more.

The library’s original home was bought by the Metropolitan Railway Company and demolished in 1865. The library moved to Bloomsbury and was housed at No 8 Queen Square from 1865 to 1873. It then moved into premises designed by the architect Thomas Chatfeild Clarke (1829-1895) in Grafton Street, now Grafton Way, off Tottenham Court Road.

Dr Daniel Williams remembered in a plaque at the entrance to the former library (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

When Manchester New College moved to Oxford, the library’s trustees acquired University Hall, Gordon Square, in 1889 and the library moved there in 1890. The library had close ties with Unitarians and several of its first directors were ministers associated with Newington Green Unitarian Church, London's oldest Nonconformist place of worship still in use.

The Revd Robert Travers Herford (1860-1950), librarian of Dr Williams’s Library from 1914 to 1925, was a scholar of rabbinical literature, and he was one of the first Christian scholars of the Pharisees to take a neutral view between Talmud and New Testament. He is commemorated by a blue plaque on the façade of the building. His brother, the Revd Ulric Vernon Herford (1866-1938), was one of the most colourful and eccentric Unitarian ministers in Oxford. He was a Unitarian minister in Oxford in the 1890s before seeking consecration by the Nestorian Church in India as Metropolitan Mar Jacobus I in 1902, and then formed the Evangelical Catholic Church.

After a V-1 flying bomb destroyed Essex Hall, the headquarters of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the library offered rooms to displaced workers, and they stayed there for 14 years, until 1958. In 1976, the library acquired the library of New College London, which until then had trained Congregationalist ministers.

Dr Williams’s Library closed in 2025 and its copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold by Sotheby’s at auction in 2006 for £2.8 million. After a prolonged discussion, the trust agreed to house its collection in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, and the Library moved to Manchester in 2024-2025.

Meanwhile, Manchester New College, which moved from Gordon Square to Oxford in 1889, later became Harris Manchester College and became a constituent college of the University of Oxford in 1996.

The Revd Robert Travers Herford was the librarian of Dr Williams’s Library in 1914-1925 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

As for the Wood Street congregation where Williams ministered in Dublin for 20 years, it was joined in 1762 by the Dissenters of Mary’s Abbey and together they moved to Great Strand Street where a new meeting house opened in 1764. They were joined there in 1787 by the Cook Street congregation.

In the 1850s, the Strand Street congregation decided that it needed a new church on a more prominent street. The Unitarian Church on Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin, opened in June 1863, and it was joined by the Eustace Street congregation in 1867.

The Saint Stephen’s Green congregation in Dublin is part of Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland and also maintains links with Unitarians in England, Scotland and Wales through the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

The Unitarian Church on Saint Stephen’s Green … the spiritual heir to the ministry of Daniel Williams in Dublin in the late 17th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A reminder in Bloomsbury of the ‘Russell Paradox’ and a reminder to visit the barber for a haircut

Russell Chambers on Bury Street in Bloomsbury … Bertrand Russell lived in flat No 34 from 1911 to 1916 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

I think I need a haircut, and there is no shortage of barbers in Stony Stratford to pick and choose from. But when I was thinking about the Hotel Russell and Russell Square in a blog posting yesterday (18 August 2026), I was reminded of the ‘Barber’s Paradox’.

I ask you to imagine a village that has only one barber who shaves all men, and only those men, who do not shave themselves.

At first glance, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to run a business in a small town. The men who want to save money shave themselves at home, and the rest go to the barber. But the scenario begins to fall apart when you ask: ‘Who shaves the barber?’

If the barber shaves himself, he violates the communal understanding that he only shaves people who do not shave themselves. Therefore, he cannot shave himself. But if he does not shave himself, he falls into the category of the men in the village who do not shave themselves.

According to the principle, the barber must shave everyone in this category. Therefore, he must shave himself. He needs to shave himself if – and only if – he does not shave himself. This creates a conundrum and an infinite, unbreakable loop of contradiction.

The reason a village with these rules cannot exist in real life has nothing to do with physics, geography, or human behaviour. It cannot exist because the rule itself is a logical contradiction.

Asking me to find such a village is like asking me to draw a four-sided triangle, to square the circle, to find a married bachelor, or to calculate the square root of -1. The words in the definition cancel each other out. The barber who is defined by such an exact, unbending parameter is a mathematical impossibility masquerading as a physical person. As soon as I define the parameters of the village, I have defined a place that cannot logically exist in the universe.

Epimenidou Street in Rethymnon … a reminder of the ‘Epimenides Paradox’ and a philosopher from Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The ‘barber’s paradox’ reminds me of Epimenides (Ἐπιμενίδης) of Knossos, the semi-mythical philosopher and poet from Crete who is said to have lived in the 7th or 6th century BCE, who gives his name to the ‘Epimenides Paradox’, a variation of the ‘Liar Paradox’.

It is said that while Epimenides was tending his father’s sheep, he fell asleep for 57 years in a cave in Crete that was sacred to Zeus. When he awoke after 57 years, Epimenides is said to have found he was endowed the gift of prophecy.

Epimenides is quoted twice in the New Testament. While speaking to a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in front of the Areopagus in Athens (see Acts 17: 22-34), Saint Paul quotes from Epimenides’ Cretica: ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (verse 28). Saint Paul is citing the fourth line in the Hymn to Zeus of Callimachus, with its reference to one of ‘your own poets’ (Acts 17: 28). In the same address, Saint Paul also quotes from Aratus’ Phaenomena: ‘For we too are his offspring’ (verse 28).

When Saint Paul spoke to Saint Titus about his mission in Crete, he committed a logical fallacy by quoting Epimenides: ‘It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true’ (Titus 1: 12-13a).

The ‘lie’ of the Cretans is that Zeus was mortal, for Epimenides believed that Zeus is dead. The logical inconsistency of a Cretan asserting all Cretans are always liars may not have occurred to Epimenides, nor to Callimachus, who both used the phrase to emphasise their point, without irony.

However, Saint Paul must have thought long about the idea of a dead god and whether the god’s tomb was dead as he sought to preach the Resurrection in Crete.

Epimenides is first identified as the ‘prophet’ in Titus 1: 12 by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1, 14). Clement mentions that ‘some say’ Epimenides should be counted among the seven wisest philosophers.

However, it is not clear when Epimenides became associated with the Epimenides paradox, a variation of the liar paradox. Saint Augustine restates the closely related liar paradox in Against the Academicians (III.13.29), but he does so without mentioning Epimenides. In the Middle Ages, many forms of the liar paradox were studied under the heading of insolubilia, but they were not associated with Epimenides.

Epimenides Street is a street I know well in the old town of Rethymnon in Crete. Is it paradoxical that I I have found the restaurateurs and tavern owners of Epimenidou Street, like all their fellow Cretans, to be truthful and honest? Many years ago, back in the 1980s, as I entrusted someone in Rethymnon with my wallet and valuables as I went for a swim, I was advised that it was tourists and foreigners I needed to watch out for.

The British Museum on Great Russell Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The ‘barber’s paradox’, which retells the ‘liar’s paradox’ or the Epimenides paradox, is also a retelling of ‘Russell’s Paradox’, which was formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in 1901. Russell articulated a massive flaw he had just discovered in logic, now known as ‘Russell’s Paradox’ and, at the time, it must have seemed to many that he had broken the foundations of mathematics.

Mathematicians in those days believed that a ‘set’ could be defined by any condition you could describe. Russell used the paradox to prove that naive set theory was fundamentally broken. If you can define a set as ‘the set of all sets that do not contain themselves’, you create the exact same mathematical paradox as the barber.

Russell’s thought experiment forced the entire field of mathematics to rewrite its foundational axioms to prevent self-contradicting sets from being formed.

At times I am reminded of ‘Russell’s Paradox’ when I walk along Bury Place, close to the British Museum on Great Russell Street, and see a Blue Plaque that reads: ‘Bertrand Russell 1872-1970 Philosopher and Campaigner for Peace lived here in flat No 34 1911-1916’. The building was originally ‘No 3 Russell Chambers’ and is now labelled ‘Russell Chambers, Flats 25-36’.

Russell moved into an unfurnished flat No 34 at Russell Chambers in November 1911 to be close to Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), the literary society hostess who lived nearby at 44 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. Ottoline met Russell for the first time since childhood at his home in Bagley Wood in September 1908, but their affair did not begin until 1911.

Much of the Bloomsbury area of London has been owned by Russell’s cousins, the Dukes of Bedford, for centuries. Russell’s grandfather, Lord John Russell, was a younger son of the sixth duke. The Bedford Estates still own large sections of Bloomsbury, and many of the names of the streets, squares, hotels, apartment buildings and a tube station reflect the family’s names and titles, including Russell, Bedford, Tavistock and Woburn.

Bertrand Russell had lived mainly at Trinity College Cambridge, where he was a fellow. But he took lodgings in Ipsden to be near Ottoline in the Chilterns in July 1911. She helped him to furnish the flat he rented in Bury Street, near the British Museum.

Russell chose the flat himself after looking at flats on Wells Street, off Oxford Street. The fourth floor flat in the red brick building measured 754 sq feet, and had a reception room, a main bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen, and a small room off the kitchen that was used as a study, a sitting room and a bedroom.

Among the guests there was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who stayed there on 3 October 1913. Russell wrote to Ottoline: ‘Wittgenstein stayed last night and read me bits of work he has done.’

Russell let TS Eliot and his wife Vivien use the room off the kitchen in 1915 because they were ‘desperately poor’. Vivien’s brother Maurice Haigh-Wood (1896-1980) described it as ‘a tiny cupboard room behind the kitchen’ and since Vivien had brought ‘a single cot-bed’ to furnish it, Eliot ‘slept in the hallway in a deck-chair’.

Russell was dismissed from Trinity College Cambridge in 1916 because of his opposition to World War I and so he lost his main source of income. His affair with Ottoline was also ending, and his affair with Constance (Colette) Malleson was beginning. He moved from Russell Chambers in April to rooms in 46 Gordon Square and then in August to 57 Gordon Square. He sub-let his Russell Chambers flat, and eventually went to prison that year as a pacifist.

After World War I, Russell considered keeping on the flat for his own use but concluded he could not afford it. Frank Swinnerton, an author and editor at Chatto and Windus, was a tenant at Russell Chambers until 1923, paying Russell 3 guineas a week for the furnished flat until Russell’s involvement with the first and the last home that was his alone formally came to an end.

Meanwhile, Russell was reinstated by Trinity College Cambridge in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944-1949. He had succeeded as 3rd Earl Russell in 1931 and many of my age and generation rememember him not only as a philosopher but as active pacifist and a leading figure in CND, the Committee of 100 and the Aldermaston marches. He died on 2 February 1970.

Russell Chambers was selected by English Heritage for a blue plaque commemorating Bertrand Russell. The plaque was unveiled by his son Conrad Russell (1937-2004), 5th Earl Russell, on 6 June 2002.

As for the Barber’s Paradox, the popular retelling of Russell’s Paradox, it collapses with all its presupposition if the only barber in the village is a woman. She can shave as many men – and women – she wants to without any concerns about philosophical parameters.

I never had that haircut today. I must choose one of the barber shops in Stony Stratford to visit tomorrow.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), 3rd Earl Russell, philosopher, mathematician and peace campaigner, remembered in the chapel in Trinity College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Hotel Russell has had a name change, but it is still an impressive Victorian presence on Russell Square

The former Hotel Russell on Russell Square in Bloomsbury was designed by the architect Charles Fitzroy Doll (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

I have been in London six or seven times already this year, and when I find myself in the Bloomsbury area I often stop in Russell Square to admire the former Hotel Russell, even though it has lost the name it was known by for more than a century and is now called the Kimpton Fitzroy London.

The hotel at 1-8 Russell Square is a Grade II* listed building and was designed by the architect Charles Fitzroy Doll (1850-1929), who was the surveyor of the Bedford Estate. It was built in 1892-1898 and opened in 1900.

It is built of red brick with terracotta dressings, distinctively clad in decorative thé-au-lait (‘tea with milk’) terracotta, and was modelled on the Château de Madrid near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Its roofs and turrets have striking green fish-scale tiles, and the tall Victorian chimney-stacks have horizontal brick and terracotta bands. The hotel originally had a central copper dome and lantern instead of its present tiled mansard roof, and once must have been a more impressive site.

The architect Charles Fitzroy Doll specialised in designing hotels. He also designed the dining room on the Titanic, basing it on his design for the dining room in the Hotel Russell, known until recently known as Fitzroy Doll’s.

Doll was educated in Germany, then trained as an architect under Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, and he was involved with Wyatt in designing the India Office in London in 1866-1868.

The sculptor Henry Charles Fehr modelled the life-size statues on the façade of four queens who look down on Russell Square from above the main entrance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Doll was appointed surveyor to the Bedford Estates in Bloomsbury and Covent Garden in 1885. When he designed the Hotel Russell with its distinctive cladding, Doll engaged the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr to model the four life-size statues of British queens who look down on Russell Square from above the main entrance.

Doll was a member of Holborn Borough Council, and was Mayor of Holborn in 1904-1905 and 1912-1913. He died in 1929 aged 79. His children included Christian Charles Tyler Doll (1880-1955), who was involved in the reconstruction of the grand staircase of the Palace of King Minos at Knossos in Crete, working alongside Arthur Evans. He also designed the Villa Ariadne, a residence for Evans at Knossos that now houses the Knossos Research Centre.

The style of the Hotel Russell is described in its listing as ‘flamboyant French Renaissance … derived from engravings of the Château de Madrid, with elaborate decorations.’ The architectural historians Bridget Cherry and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner call it ‘monumental’.

The hotel is known for its palatial design, and its fixtures and fittings included an ornate Pyrenean marble staircase and an interior sunken garden. Each room was fitted with an en-suite bathroom, quite an innovation at the time.

Doll’s façade also displays the coats of arms of the world’s nations as they were in 1898, incorporated in the spandrels of the first floor. At the centre of the principal façade facing Russell Square, above the main entrance, are life-size terracotta statues of four reigning queens – Elizabeth I, Mary II, Anne and Victoria – and columns decorated with putti, both surmounted with knights flanking floral decoration above the decorative foundation date ‘1898’.

The larger than life terracotta statues represent idealised versions of the four queens. Elizabeth I is readily identifiable because of her ruff,while Victoria is depicted as a very young woman. But there is some confusion over who is who when it comes to Mary II and Anne, while a fifth reigning English queen, Mary I, is noticeably absent.

The statues of the four queens are the work of the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr (1867-1940), also created the busts of four Prime Ministers – Lord Derby, Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli – on the Guilford Street façade of the hotel.

Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary II among the four queens above the hotel entrance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Fehr produced several notable public sculptures, war memorials and works for civic buildings, including sculptures for Middlesex Guildhall, Wakefield County Hall and Cardiff City Hall. His war memorials can be seen in for towns and cities throughout Britain and often feature detailed bronze statuary.

Doll also designed the Imperial Hotel (1905-1907) in Russell Square, described by the architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner as a ‘vicious mixture of Art Nouveau Gothic and Art Nouveau Tudor’. The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1967, and replaced by a contemporary, brutalist building designed by George Anthony Wilson Brandeth and where I stayed once when I was working with The Irish Times. Today it is known as the President Hotel.

Doll also designed the Flemish French-Gothic terrace of shops and apartments on the corner of Torrington Place and Gower Street. It was designed in 1907 and now includes the London University branch of Waterstones. The bookshop is in the heart of literary Bloomsbury and I, like many of my generation, still think of it as Dillon’s. Today, this branch of Waterstones claims it is the largest new and second-hand bookshop in Europe.

The Hotel Russell was one of the few hotels in this part of London not taken over by the War Office during World War II. It survived the war largely intact, but the magnificent dome was badly damaged in an air raid during the Blitz in 1941 and was never replaced.

The Hotel Russell continued to be known by that name for more than a century until 2018. After extensive renovations, the hotel reopened in 2018 as the Principal London. Three months later, it was bought by Covivio Hotels, which then transferred its management to InterContinental Hotels Group, and the hotel was renamed the Kimpton Fitzroy London later that year. The restaurant Doll designed was originally named after him but is now called Fitz’s.

Queen Anne and Queen Victoria among the four queens above the hotel entrance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The Russell Group of universities, which was formed in 1994, is named after Hotel Russell, where the first informal meetings took place, and thankfully it has not changed its name.

The Russell Group now brings together 24 British universities that are often seen as Britain’s best. Together, they receive over three-quarters of all university research grant and contract income in the UK, they award 60% of all doctorates gained in the UK, they account for 65% of all world-leading research conducted in the UK, and their research is judged overwhelmingly to be world-leading or internationally excellent. Their graduates hold 61% of all UK jobs that require a university degree, despite being only 17% of all higher education graduates.

The Russell Group first included 17 universities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial College London, Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London and Warwick.

With the exception of Warwick, which was established in the 1960s, the founder members of the Russell Group were all universities or university colleges prior to World War I, and they included most of Britain’s ancient universities and ‘redbrick universities’. Cardiff University and King’s College London joined the Russell Group in 1998.

Queen’s University Belfast became the 20th member in 2006, and four more universities – Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary University of London, and York – joined the Russell Group in 2012.

The hotel may have changed its name in recent years, but the Russell and Bedford names continue in the streets and squares of Bloomsbury, and in some places there are memories too of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. But, perhaps, more about that in the days to come.

The Russell Group of universities is named after Hotel Russell, where the first informal meetings of the group took place in 1994 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Changes in Bloomsbury reflect how William Penn is losing his place in the memory of Quakers

Friends’ House in London … William Penn’s name has been removed from one of the rooms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was meeting some people in the café in Friends’ House, London, the other day, to discuss shared literary projects, historical research and books. Our conversations over lunch and copious cups of coffee ranged over a wide range of topics, from family history and youth hostelling in Ireland, to the work of the International Atomic Research Agency in Vienna, church architecture and the role of the churches in providing a welcome for refugees and asylum seekers, to football and life in New Zealand, Ireland, Stockton on Tees and Milton Keynes.

It was one of those lingering lunches, where our conversations and imaginations ran apace, and we lost track of time.

But, having arrived at Euston Station a little earlier than I expected, and with a short amount of time on my hands before catching the train back to Milton Keynes, I spent some time strolling through the squares of Bloomsbury and also rummaging in the Quaker bookshop at Friends’ House.

Friends International Centre was once on the corner of Torrington Place and Byng Place, close to Gordon Square (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

In the past, on working trips to London when I was a trustee of USPG, I occasionally stayed at the Penn Club in Bedford Place off Russell Square. It was a tradition or habit that dated back to taking part in CND protests and meetings in the 1970s and 1980s, and other members of my family have stayed there too.

So, it was with sadness that I heard a few years ago that the Penn Club was closing at the end of March 2021.

I have vague memories too of staying at another Quaker-run guesthouse in Bloomsbury in the early or mid 1970s. Friends International Centre was in an elegant cluster of houses at the corner of Torrington Place and Byng Place, close to Gordon Square, and a five or seven minute walk from both Friends House and the Penn Club.

The houses at the corner of Torrington Place and Byng Place stand close to the Church of Christ the King on Gordon Square (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Those houses are built right up against the Church of Christ the King on Gordon Square, once the University Church and now shared by Forward in Faith and Euston Church. The houses now seem to have been incorporated into the conglomerate of university buildings around Bloomsbury. But I was reminded of their past Quaker associations a few days ago when I noticed that one of the houses is now known as William Penn House.

That reminder was all the more surprising because the memory of William Penn has been falling out of favour among Quakers in recent years. Shortly after the Penn Club closed on Bedford Place, Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) announced on 10 April 2021, ‘In a step towards becoming an actively anti-racist church, Quakers will cease to name a room in their London offices after William Penn.

Friends’ House on Euston Road houses contains the central offices of Quakers and has conference space that is available to outside groups. About 20 rooms in the building are named after Quakers who have made a difference in the world as a way to share the Quaker story with hundreds of thousands of visitors to Friends’ House each year.

Following much discussion, the decision to end naming a room in Friends’ House after William Penn was made by the yearly meeting trustees, working with the staff at Friends’ House.

William Penn’s name remains on one of the houses (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The statement in 2021 noted that ‘Penn, born in 1644, founded the state of Pennsylvania. He was an avid writer, defending religious freedom, democracy and pacifism … However, he also owned enslaved people.’

Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said, ‘Racism today is rooted in the trade of enslaved people. We are committed to tackle racism and to build an anti-racist culture. Commemorating William Penn by having a room named after him is incompatible with that. Some might say we’re rewriting history. Rather, we’re completing history, by telling the whole story and deciding not to commemorate someone who had a direct involvement in slavery. Part of telling a complete history is to acknowledge how it might previously have been understood from a limited perspective. We owe it to those who live with the legacy of slavery to take steps to redress this.’

Friends in Britain were not alone in thinking again about William Penn and other Quaker historic figures. Friends Committee on National Legislation, in Washington DC decided to rename William Penn House, a Quaker-run hostel, due to Penn’s slaveholding.

Back in Friends’ House, I spent a little time browsing in the bookshop beside the café. Looking at the history shelves, I imagine it may take a little longer to change the way William Penn is remembered among Friends. His name remains on one of the paving slabs in the garden celebrating milestones in Quaker history.

William Penn’s name remains on one of the history paving slabs in the garden at Friends’ House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The name of Soho Baptist Chapel survives on Shaftesbury Avenue despite many changes over the years

The former Soho Baptist Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue is now the Soho Outreach Centre of the Chinese Church in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

I was writing yesterday about Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church on Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of the West End in London. But for much of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, Shaftesbury Avenue had another Baptist church, on the corner of Mercer Street, known for its ‘Strict Baptist’ theology and teachings that were in sharp contrast to the traditions and ethos of neighbouring Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church.

The former Soho Baptist Chapel at 166A Shaftesbury Avenue has been known at different times as Soho Baptist Chapel, Gower Street Memorial Chapel and Shaftesbury Avenue Chapel and it is now the Soho Outreach Centre of the Chinese Church in London.

The church was built for a Strict Baptist community that had been formed almost a century earlier in 1791. Its origins dated back to the 18th century revival associated with George Whitefield and John Wesley.

In 1770, young Richard Burnham, began listening to a preacher in High Wycombe and within a few years began preaching himself. He was a pastor for a few years in Staines in Surrey. He moved to London around 1780 and was a pastor in Green Walk near Blackfriars Bridge. By 1787, he had formed a new congregation, Ebenezer Chapel, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Burnham left the congregation at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1791, and moved to Edward Street in Soho, naming his new congregation as Salem Chapel.

Four years later, another Baptist church on Grafton Street in Soho decided to relocate in 1795 and Burnham and his congregation took a lease on their property. Soho was then one of the poorest and most densely-populated areas in London. Burnham continued to minister there for another 15 years until he died in 1810.

Burnham was succeeded as the minister by John Stevens, originally from Northamptonshire, the son of a shoemaker. Stevens moved to London at the age of 16 to work as a shoemaker. He was rebaptised by Burnham at the Edward Street church and then moved with them to the new Grafton Street church.

Stevens had returned to Northamptonshire in 1795 and began preaching in his grandfather’s home. He founded a new church in Oundle in 1797, then moved to St Neots in 1799 and formed the town’s first Baptist church. He moved on to pastor a small church in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1805. He was considering his next move in ministry when Burnham died. The church at Grafton Street in Soho now had over 200 members and invited Stevens to return. He preached his first sermon at Grafton Street in July 1811 and by 1812 the church had 100 new members.

Stevens was known for his idiosyncratic positions, including his view on the pre-existent humanity of Christ. Soon, numbers meant a new building was needed, and the congregation moved west in 1813, still in the Soho area to a chapel built for Catholic services behind the Spanish ambassador’s house at No 8 Saint James Square, York Street, now Duke of York Street.

By 1818, Stevens’s writings were being debated heatedly. The church split into two factions, with Stevens building a new purpose-built chapel, Salem Chapel, at Meards’ Court, behind No 8-10 Wardour Street. He preached his last sermon at Salem Chapel in 1847 and died in October 1847. The Salem Chapel continued with JE Bloomfield and JT Briscoe as pastors until the 1870s, when it was sold to Bloomsbury Baptist Mission and then demolished in 1907.

Meanwhile, the faction that disagreed with Stevens’s Christology rejoined the Soho Chapel congregation that Burnham had originally founded at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and called George Comb as pastor. The congregation was located at Lisle Street when Comb became their pastor in January 1824, then moved to Oxford Street in 1825 and built a new chapel there in 1835.

Comb died in 1841, and was succeeded as pastor by George Wyard (1842-1856), John Pells (1858-1864) and Joseph Wilkins (1866-1873). While Joseph Wilkins was pastor, 23 churches met at Soho Chapel on Oxford Street in 1871 to form the Metropolitan Association of Strict Baptist Churches, later the Association of Grace Baptist Churches South East.

The former Soho Baptist Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue was designed by the architect William Gillbee Scott and built in 1887-1888 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

John Box, who became the pastor in 1875, drafted the Articles of Faith and oversaw building new church premises on Shaftesbury Avenue. The church was forced to move from Oxford Street in 1885 when the freeholder wanted to buy-out the lease to build business premises.

A new site was bought from the Metropolitan Water Board in June 1886. The site was on Shaftesbury Avenue, then a new road from Piccadilly Circus to Bloomsbury and described the as ‘a broad thoroughfare cut through a horrible and densely populated district’. Plans were drawn up to build a new chapel to seat 500 people and additional school accommodation. While the new chapel was being built, the congregation met in the Albert Rooms, Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road.

The church was built in 1887-1888 to a design by the architect William Gillbee Scott (1857-1930) of Bedford Row. When the chapel was partly built, three memorial stones were laid in May 1887 at a service attended by 600 people. A service of dedication was held in February 1888, and the congregation moved into its new premises.

After 26 years in pastoral ministry, John Box died in 1901. The church continued for several years without a pastor until TL Sapey was appointed in 1904. But numbers were falling, there was difficulty in paying Sapey’s stipend and removal expenses, and in 1906 he moved to Brixton Tabernacle.

The membership continues to fall and by World War I many members of the congregation were living in the Finchley area. Soho Baptist Chapel was sold in 1915, when it was bought by the Gower Street Chapel, which was being forced to move. The closing service in Soho Baptist Chapel was held in March 1917. The congregation moved to Finchley, where the Soho Memorial Chapel later became High Road Baptist Church.

Soho Baptist Chapel was bought in 1915 by the Gower Street Chapel and became he Gower Street Memorial Chapel in 1917 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The original Gower Street Chapel, which opened on 9 July 1820, was built in 1820 by seceding members from William Huntingdon’s Providence Chapel, which had been rebuilt in 1811 in Gray’s Inn Road.

The congregation in the Gower Street Chapel became known as Gadsbyites, or Strict Baptists, followers of William Gadsby (1773-1844), who is regarded by many as the founding figure of the Strict and Particular Baptist movement in England. They believed only a select few of God’s chosen people, the Elect, would attain salvation and everlasting life.

The hymn-writer Henry Fowler was the minister of the Gower Street Chapel from of July 1820 until he died in 1838. After Fowler’s death, the church could not agree on appointing a new preacher. Gadsby and another preacher, John Warburton, began preaching conflicting ideas to the same congregation.

Fowler was succeeded by Edward Blackstock, but his inconsistent views on communion led to many members to leave the chapel and in 1843 they formed their own Strict Baptist Church at Eden Street, Hampstead. Blackstock stayed on at the Gower Street Chapel, with fewer and fewer people attending his services, and eventually the mortgagee foreclosed. The chapel was sold to a born-again preacher, the Revd Arthur Triggs, in 1848 and enjoyed a brief resurgence.

However, Triggs was trying to sell the chapel in 1854. By then, the disaffected and now Baptist congregation had outgrown its premises in Hampstead and was looking to move. They bought the Gower Street Chapel back in 1854, and the congregation returned with its first service on 7 January 1855.

Disputes about key aspects of Christian doctrine and practice continued to divide the congregation, and by 1860 some members were denying the divinity of Christ.

The lease of the Gower Street building was to run for 99 years from 25 March 1820. The remainder of the lease was sold to Maple & Co in May 1917 for £250, and was due to expire on 25 March 1919. The congregation began planning and fundraising for a new building in 1911, and in 1916 they bought the Soho Baptist Chapel, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Great White Lion Street.

The last service at the Gower Street Chapel was held on 24 April 1917, and the congregation moved to Shaftesbury Avenue in 1917, renaming the chapel as the Gower Street Memorial Chapel.

The church and congregation on Shaftesbury Avenue continued during the years between the World Wars without a pastor, and remained without a pastor until the appointment of JS Green (1956-1978), the first pastor the church had for 112 years.

The name was changed from Gower Street Memorial Chapel to Shaftesbury Avenue Chapel in 1994 to avoid confusion about its location.

But by the end of the 20th century, young people and students who frequented the chapel were no longer living in the Shaftesbury Avenue area and attendance figures had dropped dramatically. For financial reasons, the Gower Street Memorial Chapel finally closed in June 2002, and the building was sold in 2004 to the Chinese Church in London and became its Soho Outreach Centre.

Inside the Soho Outreach Centre today (Photograph: Chinese Church in London)

The Chinese community in London had shifted from the Docklands and the East End after World War II to the West End and the area off Shaftesbury Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s, forming a new, thriving commercial area, and by the 1970s Chinatown had become a distinct area of its own.

The first gathering of the Chinese Church in London (CCIL) was on Christmas Eve of 1950, when a small group of people led by Pastor Stephen YT Wang met in Trafalgar Square. They began holding official services on 7 January 1951.

The CCIL began inquiring about the Gower Street Memorial Chapel in the 1980s and once again in the 1990s because of its location close to the relocated Chinatown. CCIL rented space in the Gower Street Memorial Chapel for baptismal services In the early 2000s,, and finally acquired the Gower Street Memorial Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue in May 2004.

The Chinese Church in London has four other properties and seven congregations, offering services in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. Because of the popularity of the Chinese services, English services cannot be hosted in the Soho Outreach Centre and are instead are held at the Seven Dials Club.

Sunday services are in Cantonese and Mandarin, with English-language services in the Seven Dials Club (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

• Sunday services are in Cantonese from 9:30 to 11 am and in Mandarin from 11:30 to 1 pm at the Soho Outreach Centre, and in English from 11:30 to 1 pm and in Cantonese from 2:30 to 4 pm at the Seven Dials Club.

The Mercer Street side of the former Soho Baptist Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church has been ‘provoking faith in the heart of London’ for almost two centuries

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church on Shaftesbury Avenue is in the heart of London’s West End (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, at the New Oxford Street end of Shaftesbury Avenue, is in the heart of London’s West End, facing onto Prince’s Circle, and close to some of the best known West End theatres and venues. It is the central church of Baptists and It dates from 1848, when it was built by Sir Samuel Moreton Peto MP, one of the great railway developers in the Victorian age.

When the church almost 180 years ago opened on 5 December 1848, it was the first Baptist chapel to stand prominently on a London street, looking like a ‘church’ and reflecting the improved status of Victorian dissenters. It became Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in 1905. In the 20th century, it became known for its work in areas of social justice, including homelessness and poverty, and it was the first place in Britain where the Revd Martin Luther King preached.

Today, the church describes itself as ‘progressive in our theology, reverent in our style of worship, and active when it comes to social justice’, and says it aspires to be inclusive and accessible, welcoming people of all genders, and it is registered for the solemnisation of marriage for couples of all genders.

The church was built or Sir Samuel Morton Peto (1809-1889) on speculation and without a congregation because he considered the area needed a church was needed in the area. Morton Peto was an entrepreneur, civil engineer and railway developer, and for more than 20 years he was a Liberal MP, sitting for Norwich (1847-1854), Finsbury (1859- 1865) and Bristol (1865-1868). He was a partner in Grissell and Peto, which built many of London’s major buildings and monuments, including the Reform Club, the Lyceum Theatre, Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament, and he was once the world’s largest employer.

Peto wanted to create a visible Baptist witness in central London and chose his site with care, where Oxford Street was being extended east, between the squares of Bloomsbury and the slums of Saint Giles. It is said the Crown Commissioner was reluctant to lease the land to nonconformists with their dull architecture and no spires, to which Peto exclaimed, ‘A spire, my Lord? We shall have two!’

The west front includes a Lombardic frieze and a large rose window flanked by two round-arched windows (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The church was designed in 1845-1848 by the architect John Gibson (1817-1892), who had been articled to Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803-1882) in Birmingham before becoming an assistant to Sir Charles Barry in 1835 and assisting Barry in his drawings of the Houses of Parliament.

Gibson designed the church in the Early Italian Gothic style on a rectangular plan, and it was built in grey brick with stone dressings and vertical bands. The west front is flanked by rectangular towers, and has three central moulded arch entrances below a Lombardic frieze and a large rose window flanked by two round-arched windows. The two four-stage towers have vertical bands, small windows and belfries.

The towers were once stopped by Minto’s promised spires, but the twin spires were removed in 1951, when they were no longer safe due to damage during World War II.

Inside, the church has a horseshoe-shaped auditorium with a curved gallery supported on polygonal cast-iron columns. The gallery has an arcaded-patterned front. Inside the church also has curved pews and stained glass windows with Biblical texts. The balcony is reached by wrought-iron stairs on either side of the central entrance foyer, which was refitted in the 1960s.

Peering into Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church … it has been in the heart of London for almost 180 years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

‘Bloomsbury’, as it is known affectionately to those who love it, has been in the heart of London for almost 180 years. The emphasis and style have changed over the generations, but it continues to proclaim Christian love and hope.

Bloomsbury Chapel opened on 5 December 1848, the first Baptist chapel to stand proudly on a London street, visibly an ‘ecclesiastical edifice’. Because of earlier restrictions, dissident previous meeting-houses were often hidden down back alleys and in upper rooms. But as civil rights and social standing improved, Victorian Baptists, along with other free churches, wanted to be seen.

When it was being built, the new chapel was still without a congregation. Peto invited the Revd William Brock from Norwich to initiate the cause. His preaching quickly drew a congregation and 62 founder members formally constituted the church on 25 July 1849. The church only practised believer’s baptism, but both communion and membership were open to professing Christians from other traditions.

At the time, it was unusual for preachers to refer to current events from the pulpit, but Brock insisted that ‘the Bible and The Times newspaper are the best materials for the preacher’, for the God of the Bible is also the God of everyday life.

When the church realised London would have many visitors for the Great Exhibition in 1851, the church announced that those Americans who practised or condoned slavery would not be welcome at the table.

Inside Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church … the large cross became the focus in the 1960s, when an enlarged rostrum over the baptistry brought the communion table closer to the congregation (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The church grew rapidly, with nearly 900 members in the mid-1860s, members gave both money and long hours of personal effort to the various ‘labours of love’, including the Domestic Mission in the slums nearby. The chapel basement housed a day school during the week, providing cheap elementary education for children of the ‘respectable poor’.

Brock remined at Bloomsbury until 1872, and he was succeeded by the Revd Joseph Chown (1875-1885), the Revd James Baillie (1886-1896), and the Revd Benjamin Gibbon (1897-1903). Gradually the slums were redeveloped, the area improved, and the mission moved to multi-cultural Soho. As leisure hours increased, sports clubs flourished beside Bible classes, providing a full programme for young people. Several of them later entered the ministry or went overseas as missionaries.

More and more people were migrating to the new suburbs by the turn of the century, the end of the site lease was looming and the church was struggling financially. The Baptist Union and the London Baptist Association were keen to have a ‘Central Church’, similar to those of the Methodists and Congregationalists. They bought the Bloomsbury freehold, cleared the debts, and in 1905 formed Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church.

The Revd Thomas Phillips was installed as Superintendent of the reconstituted ‘institutional church’ in 1905. The separate mission was closed, and teams of deaconesses, some still in training, acted as local missionaries and social workers.

Removing the small upper gallery in the 1960s revealed the rose window for the first time from the inside (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

After World War I, depression, financial and spiritual, hit the work but the church pressed on, and continued to send missionaries abroad. The Revd Dr F Townley Lord became minister in 1930, again aided by deaconesses. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 emptied central London, and the London County Council requisitioned the basement as a refuge for people bombed out of their homes, and took over the top floor as a canteen.

Few resident families returned to the area in 1945 and the congregation had to be built anew. Dr Lord’s travels as President of the Baptist World Alliance (1950-1955) attracted more overseas visitors, and in 1958 he handed over a vigorous church whose members travelled in from far and wide.

Under the Revd Dr Howard Williams, a reconstruction scheme was carried out in 1962-1964. He moved organ and choir gallery, which once rose up behind the pulpit, and made the focus a soaring cross, with a large platform and pulpit below. An enlarged rostrum over the baptistry brought the communion table closer to the congregation. Removing the small upper gallery revealed the rose window for the first time from the inside, and the black-varnished pews were stripped to reveal lighter wood.

Barbara Stanford who came to Bloomsbury in 1961 as Sister Barbara, was the last in a long line of deaconesses. The order was discontinued in 1975, when serving deaconesses were recognised as Baptist ministers.

The Revd Dr Martin Luther King preached in the church in 1961 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Revd Barrie Hibbert (1987-1999) came to Bloomsbury from New Zealand and Australia, and strongly promoted ecumenical contacts. Under major refurbishments in 1998-1999, marking the 150th anniversary of the church, the foyer was enlarged, with a glass screen making the sanctuary visible from the street, and a prayer chapel was created.

The Revd Dr Brian Haymes, who had spent 20 years in academic life in Baptist theological colleges, returned to pastoral ministry and served Bloomsbury in 2000-2005. He was often heard on BBC radio’s Morning Service, and he introduced new teaching programmes.

The church supported the Jubilee Campaign to end world debt, became a ‘Fair Trade Church’, supported the Peace March against British involvement in war in Iraq, and the joint Churches’ Make Poverty History campaign was launched there.

The Revd Dr Ruth Gouldbourne and the Revd Dr Simon Perry became co-ministers in 2006. Ruth Gouldbourne had previously taught doctrine and church history at Bristol Baptist College; Simon Perry returned to college chaplaincy at Cambridge in 2011. The Revd Dr Simon Woodman, who was tutor in Biblical Studies at South Wales Baptist College, became co-minister in Bloomsbury in 2012.

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church remembers Martin Luther King’s visit in 1961 and continues to struggle for justice and against racism (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

For many decades, a significant part of Bloomsbury’s ministry has been offering an affirming welcome to the LGBT+ community. In 2015, it became the first Baptist Church in the UK to hold a same-sex marriage. The church is involved with other local organisations, including the 2:23 Network and Soho Gathering, the Simon Community and C4WS Night Shelter, Dragon Hall, a local community centre), Ekklesia, the public issues thinktank and Churches Together in Westminster.

Today, the church describes itself as ‘progressive in our theology, reverent in our style of worship, and active when it comes to social justice. Those who find their home at Bloomsbury believe there is no one 'right' way, but rather we search together for a deeper understanding of Jesus and what it means for us to follow him.’

The church says it is ‘provoking faith in the heart of London. Our mission is to discern God’s loving and inclusive will: we nurture faith and build community, we confront injustice, create sanctuary and deepen relationships.’

The church aspires to be inclusive and accessible. It is a member of the Inclusive Church Network, believes that Black Lives Matter and is committed to becoming an anti-racist community. Recognising that gender is not binary, the church welcomes people of all genders, and is registered for the solemnisation of marriage for couples of all genders.

• Sunday services at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church are at 11 am.

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church describes itself as ‘progressive in our theology, reverent in our style of worship, and active when it comes to social justice’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Daily prayer in the Kingdom Season: 23, Sunday 23 November 2025, Christ the King

Christ enthroned in majesty in the centre of the Christ the King or Cooper Window in Saint Peter’s Church, Berkhamsted (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are in the Kingdom Season, the time between All Saints’ Day and Advent, and today is the Feast of Christ the King, the Sunday next before Advent. Later this morning, I hope to be part of the choir at the Parish Eucharist in the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Giles in Stony Stratford. The music this morning includes the motet Locus Ipse composed in 1869 by Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) and a version of Psalm 46 (Deus Noster Refugium, God is our hope and strength) by Martin Luther.

Before the day begins, before having breakfast, I am taking some quiet time early this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a short reflection;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

Three royal crowns for Christ the King … a window in Saint Mary’s Church, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 23: 33-43:

33 When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. [34 Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35 And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ 36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, 37 and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ 38 There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ 42 Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ 43 He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

Christ the King depicted in the East Window (1948) by Lilian Josephine Pocock in the Church of Christ the King in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Today’s Reflections:

Today is the Feast of Christ the King and the Sunday next before Advent (23 November 2025). Our readings bring us to the end of the Church Year. The Gospel reading also marks the last Sunday at the end of our journey in the Lectionary with Christ on his journey to Jerusalem. We will begin it all again next Sunday, with a new cycle of readings, beginning with Advent Sunday (30 November 2025), and reading through Saint Matthew’s Gospel.

But this morning’s Gospel reading (Luke 23: 33-43) gives us time to pause and reflect on the fact that we have followed Christ for seven months or so through Saint Luke’s Gospel. We have seen Saint Luke’s distinctive emphases on the poor and their inclusion in the Kingdom, the inclusion of those not normally invited as guests to the great feasts.

In the Gospel reading, we are at the moment when Christ is crucified. The crucifixion is truly emphasised on Good Friday, but this morning the emphasis is on Christ the King and the request by one of the criminals to ‘remember me’ in the kingdom.

The Epistle reading (Colossians 1: 11-20) includes a hymn praising Christ as the king of this kingdom, listing his royal attributes in poetic form (verse 15-20):

‘In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.’

The Gospel reading may seem out of sequence as we approach Advent and prepare for Christmas. However, the Crucifixion is one of the ways in which we see Christ revealed to the world as King. The Crucifixion is his triumph rather than his defeat, and it leads not to our death but to his Resurrection and our promise of life in all its fullness, personalised in the way Christ assures the second criminal of the immediate promise of a place with him in Paradise.

This reading challenges to accept that today, this day (σήμερον, símeron), this very day, is the time to respond to the claims the kingdom makes on us (verse 43).

This reading may seem to be a little out of sequence on a Sunday morning. We are preparing for Christmas, you may think, not for Good Friday and Easter. But we forget that so easily. I hear on all the radio chat shows people already talking about this being the Christmas Season … before Advent has even started. In Britain, people are even talking about a Christmas election, rather than an Advent election.

But Advent is the season of preparation for Christmas, with the Lectionary readings telling us about the Coming of Christ.

We have made Christmas a far-too comfortable story. Christmas is a story about poverty and about people who are homeless and rejected and who can find no place to stay.

It is a messy story about a child born surrounded by the filth of animals and the dirt of squalor.

It is a story of shepherds who are involved in dangerous work, staying up all night, out in the winter cold, watching out for wolves and sheep stealers.

It is a story of trickery, deceit and the corruption of political power that eventually leads to a cruel dictator stooping to murder, even the murder of innocent children, to secure his own grip on power.

That is why in the weeks before Advent we have readings that remind us about what the coming of Christ into the world means, what the Kingdom of God is like, and how we should prepare for the coming of Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Marking the Sunday before Advent by crowning Christ as King helps us to focus on Advent from next Sunday (30 November), and Advent is supposed to be a time and a season of preparing for the coming of Christ.

Kingship may not be a good role model for people living in modern democratic societies where the heads of state are elected – although many of the elected heads of state in many countries good models for democratic leadership either. Nor are the models of kingship in history or in contemporary society so good. Let me share some examples:

• We are familiar with a model of monarchy that paradoxically appears to be benign on the one hand and appears aloof and remote on the other hand, at the very apex of a class system defined by birth, title and inherited privilege.

• In other northern European countries, the model of monarchy is portrayed in the media by figureheads who are slightly daft do-gooders, riding around on bicycles in parks and by canals in ways that threaten to rob kingship of majesty, dignity and grace.

• Or, take emperors deposed in my own lifetime: Halie Selassie sat back in luxury as his people starved to death; Emperor Bokassa, was a tyrant accused of eating his people and having them butchered at whim.

• In the United States, it seems Trump would rather be king than a President with the usual checks and balances of a democratic society. • Even in Britain and Ireland, we sometimes need to be reminded that the word minister, whether we use it for government ministers or church ministers, is supposed to convey the idea of service, serving the people and serving God. The petition in the Book of Common Prayer pleads: ‘Endue thy ministers with righteousness’; and the response is ‘And make thy chosen people joyful’.

This morning, this Sunday before Advent, gives us time to pause and reflect on why, as we were reading our way through Saint Luke’s Gospel, we have been following Christ on his journey to Jerusalem. For it is there that he will be revealed in glory as the Son of Man and the King.

Discussing how the Lectionary can at times provide readings that are incongruous or out of season, Canon Giles Fraser – who resigned as Canon Chancellor of Saint Paul’s because of the cathedral’s response to the Occupy protests – wrote in the Church Times many years ago [4 November 2011]:

‘For too long the Church has been obsessed with its own internal workings and with silly arguments about sex. Now is the time for a new debate and a new emphasis. For if we are not fully involved with complex discussions about the relationship between financial justice and the way our financial institutions work, then we might as well give up on being a proper Church and admit that we are the spiritual arm of the heritage industry.’

He recalls that the Evensong readings set for his last sermon in Saint Paul’s Cathedral included: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation’ (Luke 6: 20, 25).

This morning’s Gospel reading challenges us in a way that is uncomfortable, but with things that must stay on the agenda of the Church.

The genius of power is revealed in those who have it and can use it but only do so sparingly. Christ’s choice is not to gratify those who want a worldly king, whether he is benign or barmy. Instead, he displays supreme majesty in his priorities for those who are counted out when it comes to other kingdoms.

Christ rejects all the dysfunctional models of majesty and kingship. He is not coming again as a king who is haughty and aloof, daft and barmy, or despotic and tyrannical. Instead he shows a model of kingship that emphasises what majesty and graciousness should mean for us today – giving priority in the kingdom to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner and the refugee.

In the current negative stormy debate about refugees, asylum seekers and migrants on small boats, a debate fuelled by racism, prejudice and extremism, I find comfort in the opening words of the Psalm this morning and its descrption of God as ‘our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’ (Psalm 46: 1). The Psalmist goes on to say, ‘Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam’ (verses 2-3).

As we prepare for Christmas, we should be preparing to enjoy time with our families and friends, time for a good winter’s holiday. But we should also remember the reason we have Christmas, the reason Christ came into the world, and the reason he is coming again.

We can look forward to seeing the Christ Child in the crib and to singing about him in the carols. But let us also look forward to seeing him in glory.

Let us be prepared on this Feast of Christ the King to see him in the hungry, the thirsty, the unwelcome stranger, those who are naked and vulnerable, those who have no access to adequate health care, the refugees and asylum seekers facing endless taunts and bullying day-by-day, those who are prisoners, those who have no visitors and those who are lonely and marginalised.

A sculpture of Christ the King at the Church of Christ the King in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Today’s Prayers (Sunday 23 November 2025):

The theme this week (23 to 29 November) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Gender Justice’ (pp 58-59). This theme is introduced today with Reflections by Rachael Anderson, former Senior Communications and Engagement Manager, USPG, who writes:

Since its launch 30 years ago, the Global 16 Days Campaign has brought together over 6,000 organisations across 185 countries, reaching more than 300 million people in the fight against gender-based violence (GBV). I first encountered it when I worked for a grassroots women’s organisation and now, over eight years on, I am pleased that USPG also lend their voice to the campaign. The ‘16 Days’ initiative enables USPG to amplify our commitment to gender justice, raise awareness, and reflect on the progress that our church partners have made in ending gender-based violence.

However, the campaign lives on because there is still so much work to be done in the fight against gender-based violence. These 16 days provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the ongoing reality of GBV across the globe and to consider our responsibility, as Christians, to demand accountability and work towards an end to GBV and discrimination in all areas of life. As we are called to ‘mourn with those who mourn’ (Romans 12: 15), true activism cannot exist without empathy. Yet, mourning alone is not enough – our faith compels us to take action and make a tangible difference for the women and girls who endure injustice.

During these 16 days, I encourage you not only to reflect but also to look within your own communities for ways to practically support survivors of GBV and advocate for an end to discrimination.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Sunday 23 November 2025, Christ the King) invites us to pray as we read and meditate on Luke 23: 33-43.

Christ the King in the Selby-Lowndes family war memorial window in Saint Mary’s Church, Bletchley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Collect of the Day:

Eternal Father,
whose Son Jesus Christ ascended to the throne of heaven
that he might rule over all things as Lord and King:
keep the Church in the unity of the Spirit
and in the bond of peace,
and bring the whole created order to worship at his feet;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works,
may by you be plenteously rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This Post Communion prayer may be used as the Collect at Morning and Evening Prayer during this week.

Additional Collect:

God the Father,
help us to hear the call of Christ the King
and to follow in his service,
whose kingdom has no end;
for he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, one glory.

Yesterday’s Reflections

Continued Tomorrow

Christ the King … an image in this weekend’s notices at the Anglican Church of Saint Thomas in Kefalas, Crete,

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org