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 churches I visited was Saint Anne’s Church in Soho, including the remaining tower of the original church facing onto Wardour Street and the modern church facing onto Dean Street.
Saint Anne’s was known in the past for its musical traditions and its literary associations with writers and poets, including Dorothy L Sayers, Rose Macaulay, Iris Murdoch, TS Eliot and John Betjeman. The church is also associated with the homeless charity Centrepoint and was known in the past for its radical and innovative priests, exemplified in the life and ministry of the late Kenneth Leech.
Although the church was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, the church community survived through the post-war decades and the church was rebuilt in the 1990s. Parts of the churchyard around the west end with the surviving tower are Saint Anne’s Gardens, a public park that opens onto the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street.
The first certain reference to the church is in the minutes of a meeting of the vestry of Saint Martin in the Fields, in August 1676. A few months earlier, in April, the foundation stone had been laid of a new church in the parish, which was in 1685 to become the church of the parish of Saint James, Westminster.
No grant of the site by the Crown to an individual or corporate body seems to be recorded and its appropriation to church use seems to have been effected simply by an Act of Parliament in 1678 that authorised the establishment of the parish and stated the boundaries of the church and churchyard site. Later, the parish would give rise to two new churches, dedicated to Saint Thomas and Saint Peter, but they became part of the same parish again in 1945.
Saint Anne’s Church in Soho was consecrated on 21 March 1686, the Sunday before Lady Day, by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, as the parish church of the parish of Saint Anne Within the Liberty of Westminster, created from part of the parish of Saint Martin in the Fields. The ceremony was interrupted by dinner and was followed by the consecration of an additional cemetery for the parish of Saint Martin’s on the site of a former Greek church.
The parish was dedicated to Saint Anne because Compton had been tutor to Princess Anne, who later became Queen Anne. Construction began in 1677 on a plot that was then in the countryside and known as Soho Fields.
It seems the original church was designed by William Talman, an architect who worked under Sir Christopher Wren. Saint Anne’s was a basilica, having a nave of five bays terminated by an eastern apse, serving as a chancel, and flanked by north and south aisles containing galleries that were linked by a gallery across the west end of the nave.
The interior was 64 ft wide, the nave was 31 ft clear, and 78 ft long, excluding the chancel apse which added a further 18 ft. The chancel apse was flanked by vestibules with staircases to the galleries, that were also reached by open staircases at the west end of each aisle.
A square tower projected centrally from the west front, but the church remained without a spire for 32 years. The church tower was only completed in 1718, with the addition of a timber spire.
Saint Anne’s House at 57 Dean Street was first occupied ca 1705 by the parish watch-house, and later also by the parish fire-engine-house and vestry-room.
In its early years, the church had a fashionable congregation, including the Prince of Wales, later George II, and the actress Hester Davenport, who was buried in the churchyard in 1717.
The tower had become unstable by 1800 and the new tower was completed by 1801, its bell chamber’s Portland stonework by March 1803, and its copper cupola by May 1803. The tower’s ground floor room of the tower became the parish vestry room, and was later used as a robing room for the clergy.
Canon Nugent Wade (1809-1893), who was the Rector of Saint Anne’s in 1845-1891, was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, and was ordained deacon (1832) and priest (1833) in Saint Fethlimidh’s Cathedral, Kilmore, Co Cavan. Before coming to Soho, Wade was the Anglican chaplain in Elsinore.
AW Blomfield rearranged the interior for Wade in 1866. Although Wade faced opposition in Saint Anne’s for his ‘Puseyite’ sympathies, he made Saint Anne’s a gathering place for the new generation of Anglo-Catholics in central London. He founded the Saint Barnabas House of Charity in Soho, which ministered to prostitutes, and Saint Mary’s Crown Street, an Anglo-Catholic centre in a slum district within the parish of Soho.
The Revd Basil Graham Bourchier (1881-1934) was the Rector of Saint Anne’s in 1930-1933. During World War I, while he was a chaplain with the Red Cross in Belgium, he was arrested by the Germans as a spy. But his death sentence was commuted, he escaped, and became an army chaplain.
Bourchier was a flamboyant preacher and was satirised as the Revd Cyril Boom Bagshaw in ASM Hutchinson’s If winter comes (1921) and as a ‘totally preposterous parson in Evelyn Waugh’s A little learning (1964). He resigned before being enfolded in a major scandal about his sexuality and his inappropriate relationships with choirboys. Little Dean Street in Soho was renamed Bourchier Street in 1937.
The Revd Gilbert Shuldham Shaw (1886-1967), who was the Vicar of Saint Anne’s from 1940, was another Dublin-born priest at Saint Anne’s. He had been baptised by his mother’s uncle, William Conyngham Plunket, Archbishop of Dublin. With his successor Patrick McLaughlin, he is thought to be part of the inspiration for Rose Macaulay’s character of Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg in The Towers of Trebizond (1956).
During World War II, the whole church, apart from the tower, was burned out in the Blitz on the night of 24 September 1940, and the tower was left derelict. Saint Thomas’s, Regent Street, and the adjoining Saint Anne’s House in the Upper Room, later known as the ‘Allen Room’, were used for worship from then on, although Saint Thomas’s has since been demolished.
After the war, Jacques Groag proposed in 1945 keeping the ruins as a war memorial, but by 1949 it was assumed that the church would not be rebuilt. The remains of the east wall were the only significant parts left standing, and they were demolished in 1953. The site was deconsecrated and prepared for sale, and the parish was amalgamated with those of Saint Thomas’s Church, Regent Street, and Saint Peter’s Church, Great Windmill Street, creating the Parish of Saint Anne with Saint Thomas and Saint Peter, centred on Saint Thomas’s.
Despite having no building, from 1941 to 1958, the Saint Anne Society under Patrick McLaughlin encouraged links with the literary world, and the members included Father Gilbert Shaw, JC Winnington-Ingram, Charles Williams, Agatha Christie, TS Eliot, Father Max Petitpierre, Dom Gregory Dix, Arnold Bennett, CS Lewis, Rose Macaulay and Dorothy L Sayers. Others who contributed from time to time included John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, Lord David Cecil, Rebecca West and Christopher Dawson.
Even when there was no church building, the church community remained active in those post-war years, and the tower was used as a chapel for a time in the 1950s. The novelist Dorothy L Sayers was a longtime churchwarden of the parish and member of the Saint Anne’s Society. Her ashes were buried in the base of the tower in 1957.
Father Patrick McLaughlin (1909-1988) was the Rector Saint Anne’s in 1953-1962. He introduced the ‘basilican mode’, in which the priest faces the congregation instead of facing the altar with his back to the congregation. This liturgical innovation was widely adopted in the Church of England some 20 years later. Patrick McLaughlin became a Roman Catholic in 1962.
Saint Anne’s has a long history of being socially inclusive and engaged with its diverse and ever-changing community. The Revd Dr Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), who was a curate at Saint Anne’s in 1967-1971, was a priest in the Anglo-Catholic tradition and a socialist, and a leading advocate of contextual theology.
At the heart of his faith was what he called ‘subversive orthodoxy’: the indissoluble union of contemplative spirituality, sacramental worship, orthodox doctrine and social action. He argued that this conjunction of faith and the quest for justice, which points to the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, is the essential mark of the Christian life and underlies scripture, the teachings of the Church Fathers and the Christian mystical tradition.
He founded the homeless charity Centrepoint in the basement of Saint Anne’s House in December 1969, and it was based at the church until 2023.
After many years as a bomb site and car park, the present building was created in 1991 thanks to the tenacity of members of local community. By selling part of the site to build social housing and provide commercial properties, funds were raised to create the community hall and the simple but attractive chapel that extends into the hall on Sundays.
Princess Anne laid the foundation stone of the new complex on 12 March 1990, and it was opened and rededicated on Saint Anne’s Day, 26 July 1991. The new church complex is not an actual reconstruction of the old church and can be varied from a large to a small space. It is set within a community centre and is a community focus.
The tower, which had been partly restored in 1979 by the Soho Society, was fully restored when the whole church was rebuilt in 1990-1991 and is now a Grade II* listed building.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the rebuilding of the church, a redesigned entrance on Dean Street, featuring the name of Saint Anne’s in neon lights, was dedicated by the Bishop of London in December 2016 and it ensures the church remains a visible presence in the community.
The new entrance was designed by two UAL London students, Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i. Their redesign of the entrance won the President’s Award for alterations to a church building in the 2017 Church Architecture Awards. The judges said their design made ‘a dynamic and inviting entrance to the church’.
Saint Anne’s is a thriving church community today and a venue for many local community and charitable events. It also houses the Soho Society, and the anti-homophobic bullying charity Diversity Role Models.
Saint Anne’s also has had its own community coffee shop, Sacred Grounds, since January 2024, on the very site where Centrepoint was founded in 1969.
Saint Anne’s was once famous for its high musical standards. The church received an organ in 1699 from the Dowager-Queen’s Chapel in Saint James’s Palace. The first organist Dr William Croft wrote the tune ‘Saint Anne’ in 1708, a tune still used for the hymn ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’.
During Wade’s half century at Saint Anne’s, the choir under Sir Joseph Barnby revived the interest in Bach in England, starting with the Christmas Oratorio and Crescendo to the Mathew Passion. Barnby, who was the organist in 1871-1888, introduced the first performance in Britain of Bach’s ‘Saint John Passion’. The first religious service with music broadcast by radio came from Saint Anne’s in the 1920s.
The churchyard, Saint Anne’s Gardens, was leased to Westminster City Council in 1894, having been closed to burials 40 years earlier. It is believed that up to 60,000 bodies are still buried there, and this explains why the ground is so high above the entrance on Wardour Street.
One of the few surviving monuments in the churchyard is a curious tablet to King Theodore of Corsica, who reigned briefly from March to November in 1766. It includes a crown in an oval panel above an inscription composed by Horace Walpole. The biography of the soi-disanting was published by Percy Fitzgerald in 1890.
King Theodore’s wife Catalina Sarsfield was the daughter of David Sarsfield of Kilmallock, Co Limerick, a younger brother of Dominick Sarsfield, 4th Viscount Sarsfield, and his French-born wife, Marie d’Athboy. She is sometimes mistakenly said to have been the daughter of Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, and Lady Honora Burke, but she was part of a different branch of the Sarsfield family.
Below this monument is a stone commemorating the burial in the churchyard of William Hazlitt (1830).
The Revd Simon Buckley has been the Rector of Saint Anne’s, Soho, since 2013, and is a former assistant priest. Previously, he was a professional puppeteer, and worked with the Muppets and the original Spitting Image. The Revd Martha Pennel has been the curate of Saint Anne’s since 2023
• The main service in Saint Anne’s is the Sunday Eucharist at 11am, celebrated with ‘a relaxed dignity’. The regular weekday services include Holy Communion on Tuesday at 1:05 pm and Morning Prayer on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursday at 8:30 am and Evening Prayer at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays. Other services range from Christmas Carol Services and the liturgies of Holy Week, to Prayers at Pride and Soho Parish Sundays.
