Saint John Henry Newman, the new Doctor of the Church, is remembered in Oxford, Dublin and in Calverton

The bust of John Henry Newman in the Newman University Church in Dublin is by the sculptor Thomas Farrell (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

John Henry Newman is to be declared a Doctor of the Church, Pope Leo has announced in recent days. He is the 38th Doctor of the Church recognised by the Vatican, and the third to be associated with England, after the Venerable Bede and Saint Anselm of Canterbury.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is celebrated in the calendar of the Church of England today (11 August), the anniversary of his death in 1890, but in the Roman Catholic Church on 9 October, the anniversary of his reception into that Church in 1845.

Newman was one of the most influential figures in Church life in both England and Ireland in the 19th century. He is remembered in England as the most prominent member of the Oxford Movement, reconnecting Anglicanism with its Catholic roots and heritage, and in Ireland as the founding rector of the newly-formed Catholic University of Ireland in 1854. He was also the founding figure in the Newman University Church which built on Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin, in 1855-1856.

John Henry Newman was born at 80 Old Broad Street on 21 February 1801 and was baptised in Saint Benet Fink on 9 April 1801 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Newman was canonised a saint in Rome six years ago [13 October 2019], and was beatified 15 years ago on 19 September 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI during his four-day visit to England.

The future Cardinal John Henry Newman was born at 80 Old Broad Street, London, on 21 February 1801 and was baptised in Saint Benet Fink Church on 9 April 1801. At an early stage in life he was seen as evangelical background in the Church of England. He studied at Trinity College Oxford, and became a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1822. He was ordained deacon in Christ Church, Oxford, in 1824, priest in 1825.

Newman remained a fellow of Oriel College from 1822 to 1845. During those years he was also the college chaplain (1826-1831, 1833-1835) and Vicar of the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin (1828-1843).

Tom Tower and the Quad at Christ Church, Oxford, where Newman was ordained (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Newman went on a holiday in Italy in 1832 with his friend Richard Hurrell Froude (1801-1836) of Oriel College and his father. He left them in Rome as he travelled on to Sicily, but there he became gravely ill with a fever. When he recovered, the weather delayed his return to England and he was forced to stay on board his ship for a further three weeks.

During those weeks, he wrote one of his best-known and best-loved poems and hymns, ‘Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom’. The poem expresses his sense of complete uncertainty and disorientation, and reveals his sense of groping in the darkness, pleading with God to lead and guide him.

The University Church of Saint Mary, where Newman was Vicar during his days in Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

On the Sunday he returned to Oxford, 14 July 1833, Newman heard John Keble (1792-1866), Professor of Poetry at Oxford, preach his famous ‘Assize Sermon’ in Newman’s own church, the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin.

Keble’s sermon was an attack on state interference in church affairs, prompted by government moves to reform the diocesan structures of the Church of Ireland, and is now regarded as the beginning of the Oxford Movement.

Newman became the driving force behind the Oxford Movement, alongside Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), and Oriel is pre-eminently the college of the Oxford Movement, the first phase of which lasted from 1833-1845. Its proponents produced the Tracts for the Times, a series of 90 tracts that gave them the name ‘Tractarians’, and Newman wrote 27 of the tracts.

Besides Newman, Keble and Pusey, other figures of the movement associated with Oriel included Robert Wilberforce (1802-1857), Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), GA Denison (1805-1896), Thomas Mozley (1806-1893), Charles Marriott (1811-1858) and RW Church (1815-1890). Richard Whately (1787-1863) was a fellow of Oriel (1811-1821) and Drummond Professor of Political Economy in Oxford (1830-1831) before becoming Archbishop of Dublin (1831-1863).

Oriel College is pre-eminently the college of the first phase of the Oxford Movement (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Many of the Tractarians met in the Rectory in Calverton, near Stony Stratford, including Newman, Pusey, and Edward Manning, and some of the Tracts for the Times were planned if not written at Calverton. At the time, the Revd the Hon Charles George Perceval (1796-1858) was the Rector of Calverton. He was of Irish descent, a devout High Churchman and a supporter of the Tractarians. He came to Calverton in 1821 at the relatively young age of 24, and was a younger brother of George Perceval (1794-1874), who became the 6th Earl of Egmont in 1841.

Meanwhile, Newman was gaining a reputation as a poet and his edited collection, Lyra Apostolica, including ‘Lead, kindly light’, was published in 1836.

In a seminal exposition of Anglicanism in his Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman maintained that the essential points of Anglicanism are its doctrine, its sacramental system and its legitimate claims to be the Catholic Church in England. However, he reached a turning point in 1841 with Tract 90, in which he tried to reconcile the 39 Articles with the decrees of the Council of Trent and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Newman was censured by the university and was silenced by the Bishop of Oxford. He resigned from Saint Mary’s in 1843, and after considerable hesitation became a Roman Catholic and was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Dominic Barbieri on 9 October 1845.

He defended this decision in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Five years later, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was officially founded in England and Wales. Newman founded the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Birmingham, and remained at the Oratory in Birmingham for the rest of his life – apart from a few short years in Dublin.

At the time of Newman’s move, Roman Catholicism in England was going through a traumatic transition. Until the early 19th century, it was dominated by the old landed recusant families – the sort of families who would later figure in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. But it was changing with the increasing influx of poor Irish immigrants, and Birmingham became the heart of the Irish slums in the English Midlands.

Newman House, where Newman was Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, and Newman University Church on Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

In 1854, Newman moved to Dublin, and for four years he was rector of the newly-founded but short-lived Catholic University of Ireland. His plans for a university were frustrated, yet his stay in Ireland saw him publish his The Idea of a University.

Newman lived at Mount Salus in Dalkey during the autumn of 1854 while he was establishing the Catholic University in Dublin. He wrote, ‘Tastes so differ that I do not like to talk, but I think this is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw.’

His college chapel survives as Newman University Church on Saint Stephen’s Green, beside Newman House, the Department of Foreign Affairs at Iveagh House, and the former sites of the Methodist Centenary Church and Wesley College.

The University Church was designed by John Hungerford Pollen, who was invited to Dublin by Newman as Professor of Fine Art. Newman rejected Pugin’s Gothic style, seeing in it echoes of the pagan forests of Northern Europe; but he also associated the classical style with his Anglican past and Greek and Roman paganism. And so, he favoured the Byzantine style for his university church.

Pollen’s design is the only successful Byzantine-style church in Ireland, and shows the influence of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.

Newman House on Saint Stephen’s Green now houses the Museum of Literature Ireland and backs onto the Iveagh Gardens.

Newman University Church, Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin … celebrating John Henry Newman today (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Practical organisation was not among Newman’s gifts, and after four unhappy years in Dublin he returned to Birmingham. Little did he know that his efforts to establish a university in Ireland would eventually bear fruit in University College Dublin. The Literary and Historical Society (L&H), which he founded, remains one of the best-known university debating societies in Ireland.

Back in England, a controversy in 1863 and 1864 involving the Anglican social reformer, Charles Kingsley, led Newman to publish his Apologia pro Vita Sua, earning his place as one the greatest Catholic minds of his time. His other great works include The Dream of Gerontius (1865) and the Grammar of Assent (1870).

Newman was not uncritical of his new Church. His opposition to the Pope’s retention of temporal powers led to a breach in his friendship with Cardinal Manning (1801-1892), another former evangelical Anglican and subsequent Tractarian who had been Archdeacon of Chichester and then became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865 and a cardinal in 1875.

Yet Newman retained many Anglican friends throughout his life, including Richard Church, Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, and a nephew of Sir Richard Church, the Cork-born liberator of Greece. He read Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers on the recommendation of Pollen. When Newman heard of Kinglsley’s death he acknowledged Kingsley’s role in prompting his Apologia, his defence of the Athanasian Creed, and how he had preached kindly about Newman in Chester Cathedral, and added: ‘I said Mass for his soul as soon as I heard of his death.’

A copy of the portrait of Newman as a cardinal, by Sir John Everett Milais, in Newman University Church, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Although never a bishop, Newman was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 at the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk. He chose as his motto Cor ad Cor Loquitor, ‘Heart Speaks to Heart’.

When he died on 27 February 1891, Newman was buried in Rednall Hill, Birmingham, in the same grave as his lifelong friend, Ambrose St John, who lived with Newman as his companion for 32 years. To thwart attempts to make a cult of his remains, Newman ordered that he should be buried in a rich compost so that his corpse would decompose rapidly. When his body was exhumed some years ago in an attempt to retrieve relics, nothing was found except the brass plate and handles of his coffin.

Was Newman a pious Anglo-Catholic who prefigured those Anglican priests who moved to Rome in recent years?

Or was he essentially an Anglican who continued to resist Papal encroachments on the Church and on the conscience of the individual?

What has been called the ‘battle for Newman’s legacy’ took on a new intensity at the time of his beatification with John Cornwell’s book, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: the reluctant saint.

Pope Benedict once claimed that Newman was a faithful supporter of the papal magesterium and pontifical dogmas on many issues, and was an opponent of Catholic dissent. However, John Cornwell portrayed Newman as a dissident when it came to papal authority, infallibility, the downgrading of the laity and the primacy of papal dogma over individual conscience.

‘I shall drink to the Pope if you please,’ Newman once wrote, ‘… still to conscience first and the Pope afterwards.’ He once wrote of the ageing Pope Pius IX: ‘He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know fact, and does cruel things without meaning it.’

Newman’s hymns include ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’ and ‘Firmly I Believe’, both from his poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’. A third, well-loved Newman hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light’, shows how he was never a man for easy answers or the ready acceptance of imposed dogma and authority.

The timber relief of Cardinal John Henry Newman by Sean McDonnell in the Church of the Assumption, Dalkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Newman is remembered in the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey, Co Dublin, with a sculpted timber relief by Sean McDonnell. In the same niche is a plaque with the closing words from a sermon Newman preached on 19 February 1843, two years before he became a Roman Catholic: ‘May he support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes; and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last.’

The legacy of the Oxford Movement continues to inform life at Oriel College, Oxford. The college traditions include singing the ancient hymn Phos Hilaron (‘Hail Gladdening Light’) on feast days and other special occasions.

The space once used by both Whately and Newman was rebuilt in 1991 as an oratory and memorial to Newman and the Oxford Movement. A stained-glass window designed by Vivienne Haig and realised by Douglas Hogg was installed in 2001.

Newman has also given his name to one of the five quads at Keble College, Oxford: Liddon, the largest, named after Henry Parry Liddon; Pusey, named after Edward Bouverie Pusey; Hayward, named after Charles Hayward; De Breyne, named after Andre de Breyne; and Newman, previously the Fellows’ Garden.

A well-known prayer by John Henry Newman has been adapted in prayer books throughout the Anglican Communion:

Support us, O Lord,
all the day long of this troublous life,
until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes,
the busy world is hushed,
the fever of life is over
and our work is done.
Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us a safe lodging,
a holy rest, and peace at the last;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The oriel above the chapel entrance in Oriel College once formed part of a set of rooms occupied by Archbishop Richard Whately and by Cardinal John Henry Newman (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The URC church in Summertown closed in 2022, ending a tradition dating back almost 180 years

Summertown United Reformed Church on Banbury Road, Oxford, closed in 2022 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

When I saw the Summertown United Reformed Church and Twining House side-by-side on Banbury Road in Oxford last week, I thought one had been the church hall for the other. Instead, I came across the story of Alderman Francis Twining, an enlightened and benevolent grocer and property developer, and the story of the Congregationalists in north Oxford.

Both buildings stand side-by-side among the attractive shops along this stretch of Banbury Road, and provide insights into the ways this suburb of north Oxford developed in the late Victorian and Edwardian years. The church has historic, social, philanthropic and architectural significance in Oxford and has contributed to the character of Summertown. It also has links with Mansfield College, an academic and intellectual centre for Congregationalism and nonconformism in Oxford.

The church was built in 1893 as a Congregational church to meet the needs of a growing community in Summertown and in greater Oxford. It was designed by the Oxford builder Thomas Henry Kingerlee (1843-1929), who designed many prominent buildings in Oxford, including the Rivermead Hospital, Headington Junior School, the original New Theatre, Elliston & Cavell (later Debenhams), the Oxford Marmalade Factory and Twining House.

TH Kingerlee was an active Congregationalist and a deacon in George Street Congregational Church. He was a local magistrate, a Liberal member of Oxford City Council, an Alderman in 1906 and twice Mayor of Oxford, in 1898-1899 and 1911-1912. He stood as the Liberal candidate for MP of Oxford in 1895, but was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Arthur Annesley (1843-1927), 11th Viscount Valentia, who held the seat until 1917. The Kingerlee firm survives today as a fifth generation business, now based in Kidlington.

Kingerlee used similar patterns when he was building Summertown Congregational Church in 1893 and Twining’s grocery shop next door at 294 Banbury Road a decade later in 1902 – now known as Twining House and the offices of the estate agents Breckon and Breckon.

Congregational churches and other nonconformist churches often have two front doors, one for women to enter and one for men. But Kingerlee’s church in Summertown has only one front door to the narthex, with two inner doors then opening to the nave.

The west door is solid timber with ironwork strap hinges that have elaborate curled elements. Inside, the craft work in the church is of the highest quality, typical of Kingerlee’s work. The main lobby or narthex has encaustic geometrical tiles, and the interior details include the hammerbeam roof, the floorboards and the pews, complete with original name card holders and cast iron umbrella holders. The organ dates from ca 1899.

The church has no aisles, columns or side chapels, and there is no decoration, reflecting the Puritan roots of nonconformists. The church was extended with the addition of meeting rooms in 1910.

The story of the growth and development of Congregationalism in Oxford, from the Puritans of the mid-17th century up to the early 21st century, is told by Michael Hopkins in his MPhil thesis at the University of Birmingham in 2010, including the story of the New Road Meeting House, the Congregational Churches on George Street and in Summertown, Mansfield College and other suburban and village chapels.

The modern Congregationalist movement in Oxford began with a secession from New Road Baptist chapel. A breakaway group of 12 New Road members was meeting in the house of William Cousins, coachmaker, in High Street in 1830, and later in the home of Samuel Collingwood, printer to the university, in St Giles’s Street.

Both men accepted the baptism of children, as did most of the 28 New Road members who had seceded by 1836. The new group’s stated aim was ‘to supply the lamentable deficiency of places of worship where evangelical truth was preached’. The first Congregational chapel in 1832 in George Street was a brick building in Anglo-Norman style, designed by J Greenshields of Oxford. It could seat 500 people, and this number had increased to over 700 by 1851.

The new society grew rapidly: there were 70 members in 1837, 143 in 1841 as well as a large Sunday school, and there were congregations of over 250 at times in 1851.

The Revd David Martin was the pastor for over 20 years (1858-1879), but after his time numbers began to fall decreased, and the church's decline was hastened by vacancies in the pastorate, rapid turnover of ministers, difficulties in raising money for the minister's stipend, and the gradual depopulation of the city centre which began in the 1880s. Members lived at rather greater distances from each other than those in Summertown and formed a less close community.

The opening of Mansfield College in 1889 provided Congregationalists in the university with a chapel of their own, but a few academics, including the lexicographer Sir James Murray (1837-1915), attended the George Street chapel.

Despite a continued decline in numbers, a site for a new church in St Giles’s Street was bought in 1900, but the proposal was abandoned in 1910. By 1930, congregations averaged only about 50, the congregation disbanded in 1933 and the church was closed and was sold to the city council.

Summertown Congregational Church was built in 1893 and opened in 1894 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

As for the church on Banbury Road, Congregationalist services started in Summertown in 1838, partly to counter the growing influence of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. A house was registered for worship in 1840, and 22 members left the George Street church in 1843 to form a new congregation in Summertown. A chapel in Middle Way was opened in 1844 with HB Bulteel among the preachers at the opening service. The new church, which served a poor area that was still a village, depended greatly on the support of prominent families such as the Lindseys and the Pharaohs, but poverty meant there were long gaps in the appointments of pastors.

A Methodist local preacher JM Crapper acted as minister in 1850-1851. The chapel was almost full in 1851, with average congregations of 160 in the morning and 190 in the evening. Methodist Free Church ministers helped at Summertown between 1867 and 1873, and from the late 1880s the pulpit was often supplied by students from Mansfield College.

Although the congregation had long been without a minister, a new and larger church was built on the Banbury Road in 1893. The foundation stone of the new building was laid on 13 June 1893 by William Crosfield, MP for Lincoln. The new church opened on 25 January 1894. The service was unusual in that it included the ordination of the new pastor named Eason, who had come from Ireland to study at Mansfield College, before being ordained as pastor at Summertown.

Eason resigned at the end of 1901 following a call from a church in Derry. By then, membership was 44 and Sunday congregations averaged 200.

Special services to attract the many newcomers to the neighbourhood helped to raise membership from 58 in 1897 to 81 in 1901. Between the World War I and World War II, a number of professional people joined the congregation, which until then had been largely working-class.

A manse was bought on 6 Beechcroft Road in 1922, and later manses were at 226 Banbury Road, 42 Lonsdale Road and then 100 Victoria Road.

When the church on George Street closed in 1933, a small number of members moved to the church in Summertown. The Revd Henry Roberts Moxley of Summertown was a member of the founding committee of Oxfam in 1942.

A prominent member from the 1950s was the theologian the Revd Dr John Marsh (1904-1994), Principal of Mansfield College (1953-1970), the Congregational representative on the World Council of Churches, and later President of the Faith and Order Committee, and author of the Pelican Commentary on Saint John’s Gospel (1968). Other members at that time included the New Testament scholar Charles Harold (CH) Dodd (1884-1971), who had retired as Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity in Cambridge in 1949.

After the Congregational Church on Cowley Road closed in 1962, Summertown’s place as the main Congregational church in Oxford was undisputed.

The ecumenical advances at Summertown and Blackbird Leys were well ahead of their time, driven by Congregationalists. But Hopkins had found that while the witness of the Congregational tradition in Oxford was strong, those efforts were divided in the face of unrecognised opportunities. Without the university or Mansfield College things would have been very different, Hopkins argues. But Summertown, in stark contrast to the other Congregational churches, developed a new model of church that was a success before the United Reformed Church was formed in 1972.

The Summertown Church Partnership was formed in 1982 after 18 months work, involving the Anglican parishes of Saint Michael’s Summertown and Saint Peter’s Wolvercote, now working as a team, and Summertown United Reformed Church, formalising their long commitment to shared outreach and church life. The Revd Ruth Whitehead became Summertown’s first female minister in 1997.

Summertown United Reformed Church closed for worship in 2022 after a continuing presence in that part of Oxford stretching back 179 years. It is still used by local arts groups. The Wessex Synod Trust of the URC owns the building and continues to hire out the premises to community groups, but now intends to sell it. A group of users have come together as Summertown Arts Community (SAC) to raise money to buy the building, and has until 28 July to buy the premises.

The active churches of the United Reformed Church in Oxford today include Saint Columba’s Church on Alfred Street, off the High Street.

Summertown Arts Community has until 28 July to buy the former church on Banbury Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Anne’s, Soho, the London church that rose from the ashes after the Blitz and lengthy closure

Saint Anne’s Church, Soho, and Saint Anne’s Gardens, a public park that opens onto the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street, London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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, Soho, was consecrated by Bishop Henry Compton of London in 1686 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

Inside the present modern chapel at Saint Anne’s Church in Soho (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 complex at Saint Anne’s has survived the Blitz and proposals for demolition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

Dorothy L Sayers was a longtime churchwarden of the parish … her ashes were buried at the base of the tower in 1957 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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, exemplified in the life and ministry of Kenneth Leech (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

The entrance to Saint Anne’s on Dean Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

The prize-winning entrance was designed by Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i and was dedicated in 1996 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

A double espresso in Sacred Grounds, where Centrepoint was founded in 1969 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

The curious monument to King Theodore of Corsica, who reigned for eight months in 1766 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

‘Lord Have Mercy’ … time for prayer in Saint Anne’s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

‘The One and The Many’: a sculptor’s exploration of creation and imagination in the heart of Fitzrovia

‘The One and The Many’ is a large sculpture by Peter Randall-Page beside the recently-restored Fitzrovia Chapel in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

I was recalling earlier this week my visit to the recently-restored Fitzrovia Chapel in Pearson Square, off Mortimer Street in London. In a sunny corner, beside the chapel and beneath the tall blocks of a new development, ‘The One and The Many’ is a large sculpture by Peter Randall-Page reminding us of humanity’s shared search for the meaning of creation and our origins.

Peter Randall-Page sculpted ‘The One and The Many’ ten years ago (2015) from a naturally eroded Bavarian granite boulder, weighing 25 tonnes and measuring 3519 x 2240 x 2065 mm and inscribed over its entire surface with marks carved in low relief.

‘The One and The Many’ is primarily a celebration of human ingenuity and imagination. ‘Our ability to convey meaning to one another, through time and space, by making marks has revolutionised human culture and society,’ Peter Randall-Page has said. ‘The human desire to make the world meaningful seems to be ubiquitous and intrinsic to our very nature.’

Embracing many cultures, his sculpture is in the heart of Fitzrovia, an area with a rich and vibrant cultural history and thriving creative community.

It is inscribed with many of the world’s scripts and symbols, from the writings of ancient Babylonia to Mongolian ‘ornamental’ seal script. They recount stories of the creation in poetic musings, sacred scriptures and epic tales of our origins.

Almost all cultures and languages across time have creation myths and narratives that seek to explain how our world came into being, and this leap of imagination illustrates the essence of creativity across many cultures and languages. One of the earliest uses of written language was almost certainly to set down these stories by making marks on clay, papyrus and vellum.

Based on scholarly advice and artistic preferences, Peter Randall-Page chose over 30 variations on the creation myth from around the world. He included writing systems from the earliest cuneiform script in ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to modern languages. The selected texts from ancient and modern writings were then arranged and inscribed onto the vast boulder, in effect the earth itself.

The texts themselves are creation stories from various cultures, each conveyed in their own writing systems, and the chosen lines speak of cosmology and the material and poetical formation of the universe in a variety of cultures.

There are quotations and texts in Minoan Linear A from Crete, Sanskrit, Japanese, Cyrillic, Ogham Irish Script, Korean, Mongolian, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Lycian and Arabic, to name but a few.

He tried to avoid pictograms and hieroglyphics, preferring to concentrate on writing as abstract mark making. He has included Braille and Morse Code, but not musical notation or mathematical symbols. A quotation from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame is represented in Morse Code, and a quotation from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘God’s Script’ is written in Braille.

In this way, ‘The One and The Many’ is an exploration of the ways we have contemplated, through a wealth of poetic musings and epic narratives, the theme of ‘In the beginning’, and it is also a celebration of human ingenuity and imagination.

Our human ability to convey meaning to one another through time and space, by making marks has revolutionised human culture. In Peter Randall-Page’s own words, ‘These myths and legends have been distilled by a kind of “cultural natural selection” over countless generations and as such they often tell us more about the human condition; our hopes and fears, than about literal cosmology.’

The naturally eroded boulder chosen for the sculpture is a fragment of solidified magma, the material the planet is made of. Its overall form is the result of innumerable chance events over a geological timescale stretching back to the creation of the Earth itself.

Peter Randall-Page has and international reputation for his large-scale sculptures, drawings and prints inspired by geometric forms and patterns from nature. He has undertaken numerous large-scale commissions and exhibited widely. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2015. His work is held in public collections world-wide, including the Tate Gallery, the British Museum and the Eden Project.

His sculpture ‘After the Winter’ was bought in 1981 by the Milton Keynes NHS Trust in anticipation of the opening of the new hospital. To this day, it is situated in a small courtyard space near the Eaglestone Restaurant, one of many that offer a quiet oasis at the hospital.

‘The One and The Many’ is permanently located at Fitzroy Place, Pearson Square, off Mortimer Street, London, and was commissioned by Exemplar and Aviva, developers of Fitzroy Place and project managed by Patrick Morey-Burrows of ArtSource.

• A dedicated website theoneandthemany.co.uk gives more background on the project as well as translations of the inscribed texts.

‘The One and The Many’ is a celebration of human ingenuity and imagination (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Farm Street Church in Mayfair, the Jesuit church displays ‘Gothic Revival at its most sumptuous’

Inside Farm Street Church or the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Jesuit-run church in Mayfair, facing the liturgical east end (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

When I was in London a few days ago, I visited half or dozen or so churches and chapels in Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Mayfair, and for the first time ever visited Farm Street Church or the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Jesuit-run church in Mayfair.

Farm Street Church and has been described by Sir Simon Jenkins as ‘Gothic Revival at its most sumptuous.’ I cannot explain why I have never visited this church until now, with its interior work by Pugin, Goldie, Salviati and Eric Gill, its stained glass by Hardman of Birmingham, Evie Hone and Patrick Pollen, and its reputation for musical excellence.

Farm Street Church has been well-known for different reasons for over 175 years, including as a community welcoming converts to Roman Catholicism, famous writers, and for challenging preaching and beautiful music and art. Many people have regularly travelled long distances to worship in the church and to seek help and advice from the Jesuit community there.

Farm Street Church was designed by Joseph John Scoles, and his façade was inspired by Beauvais Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

When the Jesuits first began looking for a site for a church in London in the 1840s, they found the site in the mews of a back street. The name Farm Street comes from Hay Hill Farm which, in the 18th century, extended from Hill Street east beyond Berkeley Square. Pope Gregory XVI approved building the church in 1843.

The Superior of the English Jesuits at the time was Father Randal Lythgoe. He originally wanted to build a church that could hold 900 people. But this was too expensive, and the church was built with a capacity of 475. It cost £5,800 to build, and this was met by private donations. Father Lythgoe laid the foundation stone in 1844. The church opened for use in 1846 and the church was officially opened by Bishop Nicholas Wiseman, later the first Archbishop of Westminster on 31 July 1849, the feast of the Jesuit founder Saint Ignatius Loyola.

The architect was Joseph John Scoles (1798-1863), who also designed the Church of Saint Francis Xavier, Liverpool, Saint Ignatius Church, Preston, and the Church of Saint James the Less and Saint Helen, Colchester. He was father of Canon Ignatius Scoles, an architect and Jesuit priest, who designed Saint Wilfrid’s Church, Preston, and the church hall at Saint James the Less and Saint Helen, Colchester.

Thomas Jackson was the builder and Henry Taylor Bulmer designed the original interior decorations. Before the official opening, The Builder described the church on 2 June 1849 as ‘a very successful specimen of modern Gothic’.

Inside Farm Street Church, facing the liturgical west, the organ and the rose window (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Because of the limited size of the plot, the church was orientated north-south rather than east-west. The plan of the church is longitudinal, consisting of a nave, aisles with chapels and the sanctuary with side chapels. The overall style is a mixture of Decorated and Flamboyant Gothic, with the west front derived from Beauvais Cathedral, and the east window from Carlisle Cathedral.

The style is Decorated Gothic and Scoles in his design of the façade was inspired by the west front of Beauvais Cathedral. The Caen stone high altar high altar was designed by AWN Pugin, with an inscription requesting prayers for the altar’s benefactor, Monica Tempest. The front panels depict the sacrifices of Abel, Noah, Melchizedek and Abraham. The reredos contains images of the 24 elders in the Book of Revelation (see Revelation 4: 10);

Above Pugin’s high altar are two Venetian mosaic panels by Antonio Salviati (1816-1890) depicting the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin Mary, added in 1875, shortly after Salviati had oepned studios in London. The sanctuary walls are lined with alabaster and marble by George Goldie (1864).

The polychrome statue of Our Lady of Farm Street, by Mayer of Munich, was donated in 1868. The figure is 6 ft high, carved in wood and decorated with gilt in the engraved style.

The words of the Ave Maria (see Luke 1: 26-28) are continued along the upper walls in the church in a series of roundels completed by Filomena Monteiro in 1996.

AWN Pugin’s high altar and the two Venetian mosaic panels by Antonio Salviati (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Originally, the church had a nave, sanctuary with side chapels and only three bays of aisles. Rich furnishings were gradually installed to embellish the church. The side chapels on the south side are dedicated to Saint Aloysius, Saint Joseph and Saint Francis Xavier.

After a fire in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in 1858, Henry Clutton rebuilt it as the Sacred Heart Chapel (1858-1863), with the assistance of John Francis Bentley (1839-1902), later the architect of Westminster Cathedral. Bentley’s other churches included Holy Rood Church, Watford.

The sanctuary floor was raised in 1864, with the east window raised correspondingly. The side aisles were added as neighbouring land became available. Clutton built the south aisle in 1876-1878, with three chapels and a porch to Farm Street. Alfred Edward Purdie added the red brick presbytery in 1886-1888, and also designed furnishings for several chapels in the 1880s and in 1905.

William Henry Romaine-Walker (1854-1940) built the north aisle in 1898–1903, with five chapels divided by internal buttresses that enclosed confessionals. The chapels and the north aisle continued to be furnished in 1903-1909: the Calvary Chapel, the Altar of the English Martyrs, the Altar of Our Lady and Saint Stanislaus, the Altar of Saint Thomas the Apostle, and the Altar of Our Lady of Sorrows.

The sanctuary walls are lined with alabaster and marble by George Goldie (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

At the same time as the north aisle was built, an additional entrance to Mount Street Gardens was added and the north-east side chapel was reconfigured by Walker as the Chapel of Saint Ignatius. The liturgical east façade became visible and accessible with the demolition of Saint George’s workhouse, which had directly abutted the site boundary, and the laying out of public gardens.

The church was remodelled in 1951 by Adrian Gilbert Scott, following the bomb damage caused during World War II. The church became the parish church of Mayfair in the Diocese of Westminster in 1966 – until then, Baptisms and weddings could not be celebrated in the church.

There were several attempts to reorder the sanctuary without altering AWN Pugin’s high altar. Broadbent, Hastings, Reid & New extended the sanctuary floor in 1980, installed a forward altar, moved the pulpit eastwards to the chancel arch, and removed the altar rail gates to the Calvary Chapel while keeping the rails.

At the same time, the roof was repaired at a cost of over £86,000. In 1987, the roof was painted to a scheme by Austin Winkley. In 1992 a fibreglass cast of Pugin’s high altar was installed as a forward altar, but has since been replaced.

The most recent restoration campaign was completed in 2007 and involved conserving the stonework on the exterior, in the sanctuary and in the Sacred Heart Chapel.

The new altar, solemnly dedicated in 2019, was carved in Carrara marble by Paul Jakeman of London and features a frieze of bunches of grapes, calling to mind the Eucharist.

The original East Window was replaced in 1912 by a new window by John Hardman of Birmingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The great window in the chancel at the litrugical east end of the church was based on the east window in Carlisle Cathedral, with the theme of the Jesse Tree, tracing the family tree of Jesus back to the father of King David. The original was tarnished by pollution, and was replaced in 1912 by a new one by John Hardman of Birmingham. The old window was then cleaned and repaired and then moved to Saint Agnes Church in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

Hardman modified the original design of the Jesse Tree in the window to make the Madonna with the Christ Child the central figure.

The rose window at the liturgical west end by the Irish artist Evie Hone (1894-1955) depicts the instruments of Christ’s Passion. She also designed the window in the Lourdes Chapel depicting the Assumption. She once had a workshop in the courtyard at Marlay Park in Rathfarnham.

The window in the Calvary Chapel by Patrick Pollen (1928-2010), who worked with Evie Hone and Catherine O’Brien at An Túr Gloine, depicts three Jesuit English martyrs and saints: Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and Nicholas Owen.

The window by Patrick Pollen depicting three Jesuit English martyrs: Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and Nicholas Owen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

In his book England’s Thousand Best Churches (1999), Sir Simon Jenkins says, ‘Not an inch of wall surface is without decoration, and this in the austere 1840s, not the colourful late-Victorian era. The right aisle carries large panels portraying the Stations of the Cross. The left aisle has side chapels and confessionals, ingeniously carved within the piers. In the west window above the gallery is excellent modern glass by Evie Hone of 1953, with the richness of colour of a Burne-Jones.’

The church opened its doors to LGBT Catholics in 2013 after the ‘Soho Masses’ came to an end after six years at the nearby Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and Saint Gregory. Archbishop Vincent Nichols attended the first of these Masses in Farm Street.

The parish also has a focus on service to the disadvantaged, especially the homeless, refugees, trafficked people and people who suffer because of the faith, and supports Jesuit and Catholic projects in the Middle East, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

William Henry Romaine-Walker built the north aisle in 1898–1903, with five chapels divided by internal buttresses (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Farm Street Church has developed a reputation for its music over the years. In the 19th century, the choir consisted only of men and boys drawn from the local Roman Catholic schools.

Between 1881 and 1916, the organist was John Francis Brewer, son of the architectural illustrator Henry William Brewer, who was just 18 when appointed.

After World War I, the choir wasunder the direction of Father John Driscoll and then Fernand Laloux, and the organist was Guy Weitz, a Belgian who had been a pupil of Charles-Marie Widor and Alexandre Guilmant. One of Weitz’s most notable students was Nicholas Danby (1935-1997) who succeeded him as the church organist in 1967. Danby’s main achievement at Farm Street was re-establishing the choir in the early 1970s, following a period of change in the late 1960s, as a fully professional ensemble.

A number of recordings were made of the music at Farm Street church were made in the 1990s. A CD of organ music was recorded at Farm Street in 2000 by David Graham and included the music of Guy Weitz. Today, the repertoire at Farm Street includes 16th century polyphony, the Viennese classical composers, 19th century romantics, 20th century and contemporary music as well as Gregorian chant.

The sanctuary was reordered on several occasions without altering AWN Pugin’s high altar (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Mount Street Jesuit Centre was launched in 2004 to provide adult Christian formation through prayer, worship, theological education and social justice. It offers non-residential retreats and courses in spirituality and provides a full-time GP service for homeless people.

When Heythrop College formally closed in 2019, the London Jesuit Centre was launched at the Mount Street Jesuit Centre. It includes a reading room of the Heythrop Library, with access to about 8,000 books and indirect access to most of the collection of Heythrop College. The London Jesuit Centre also provides teaching courses, spirituality, retreats and research. and residential and non-residential retreats.

The Month, a monthly review published by the Jesuits at Farm Street, was founded by Frances Margaret Taylor (1832-1900) in 1864, but closed in 2001. Thinking Faith was launched as an online journal in 2008 and publishes theological papers as well as papers on philosophy, spirituality, the arts, poetry, culture, Biblical studies, political and social issues and current affairs.

King Charles III attended a special Advent service at Farm Street Church organised by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), a charity that supports persecuted Christians.

• Mass times on Sundays are at 8 am, 9:30 and 11, with a young adults Mass at 7 pm. Weekday Masses, Monday to Friday, are at 8 am, 1:05 pm and 6 pm. Saturday Masses are at 10 am and 6 pm (Saturday Vigil).

The Homeless Jesus, a sculpture in Farm Street Church by Timothy Schmalz (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Stations XIII and XIV in the Stations of the Cross in Farm Street Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The polychrome statue of Our Lady of Farm Street, by Mayer of Munich, was donated in 1868 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The liturgical east façade facing Mount Street Gardens became accessible with the demolition of Saint George’s workhouse (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Guthlac’s Church in Passenham remains an example of the survival of ‘the beauty of holiness’

Saint Guthlac’s Church in Passenham, across the Great Ouse River from Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

There was an open day with cream teas last weekend, at Saint Guthlac’s Church, the parish church in the tiny Northamptonshire hamlet of Passenham, across the Great Ouse River from Stony Stratford.

Charlotte and I walked across the river and through the fields on Bank Holiday Monday to Saint Guthlac’s Church, which is lovingly maintained by local parishioners. It’s a short walk, yet Passenham is in the Diocese of Peterborough while Stony Stratford is in the Diocese of Oxford.

After Holy Trinity Church, a new and larger church, was built in neighbouring Deanshanger in 1853, Saint Guthlac’s was left in slow decline, falling into disuse and dilapidation and facing imminent closure. But the church in Passenham was saved fortuitously by the discovery in the 1950s of the wall paintings in the chancel that date back to the 1620s and that had been covered in a layer of whitewash in the 18th century.

Saint Guthlac’s Church in Passenham has choir stalls that date from 1628, with contemporary misericords (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

These wall paintings were restored by Ann Ballantyne and E Clive Rouse, and over a ten-year programme of restoration an entire scheme of church decoration, furniture, paining and carving emerged. This was all of such exceptionally quality that the church was given a Grade I listing.

The elaborate decorations in Saint Guthlac’s Church 400 years has puzzled church historians ever sense they came to light in the middle of the last century. The panels on the east wall on each side of the High Altar depict the death, anointing and burial of Christ, with separate images of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.

Other wall paintings in the chancel depict four Biblical figures – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and David – on the north wall, and the four evangelists on the south side, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – although Saint Mark was hidden at an early date by a memorial erected to Robert Banastre after he died in 1649.

The memorial erected to Robert Banastre after he died in 1649 hides Saint Mark in the the arrangement of the four evangelists on the south chancel wall in Saint Guthlac’s Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

As well as these elaborate paintings, Saint Guthlac’s has choir stalls that date from 1628, with contemporary misericords in the form of a mask, arms upheld by angels, an ox, a male head with ass’s ears, a goat, head, a winged cherub’s head, a lion, a cat’s head, a lamb, a female head and a griffin. Each stall has the name of one of the 12 apostles, and above them is decoration reflecting the classical style of Inigo Jones, with painted shallow niches, fluted pilasters and a strapwork frieze.

The gallery at the west end of the church is supported by a carved frieze that may once have been part a chancel screen that was moved to the other end of the church in the 18th century.

These works combine to create an example of early 17th century High Church decoration in line with the High Church principles of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633-1645).

The gallery at the west end ofSaint Guthlac’s Church is supported by a carved frieze that may once have been part a chancel screen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Sir Robert Banastre was a city man and a rising star in the court of James I and his son Charles I. He was comptroller to James l and became Clerk Victualler to Charles l, responsible for food and drink at the royal court. He was also member of the Court of the Green Cloth and was responsible for the collection of Ship Money in the county.

He accumulated lands in Passenham from the early 17th century, and leased land in the adjacent royal forest. He bought Passenham Manor in 1624, reflecting his growing status at court. By 1640, Banastre was wealthy enough to pay for the new chancel roof of Towcester Church. In Passenham, his coat of arms appears on his tomb and also on the exterior wall of the church behind his tomb.

Since the wall paintings were restored by Ann Ballantyne and E Clive Rouse, and the church decorations were refurbished, many church historians have discussed the significance of this elaborate scheme at a time when the Puritans were about the take power in England in the years immediately before the execution of Charles I.

There is no evidence that Banastre ever went on the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, still less that he ever saw the work of Palladio in Italy. But there are suggestions that his interior scheme at Passenham was influenced by the refurbishment of the Chapel Royal in Greenwich by Inigo Jones in 1623-1625, at a time when Banastre was a courtier. But hints of other influences have been identified in the chapel of Lincoln College Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn Chapel in London.

The figure of Nicodemus beside the Altar Saint Guthlac’s Church is a representation of faith concealed and gives rise to suspicions that Robert Banastre was a secret recusant or had Catholic sympathies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

In his study of Saint Guthlac’s, Robin Goodfellow says the Italianate characteristics of the scheme of decoration and the portrayal of Christ himself, with strong connotations of the Pieta, suggest Catholic influence.

While popular Elizabethan portrayed Joseph of Arimathea as the person who first brought Christianity to England, Goodfellow suggests the presence of Nicodemus beside the Altar is a representation of faith concealed, and it has given rise to suspicions that Banastre was a secret recusant or had Catholic sympathies. Indeed, local traditions suggests that he ‘held the faith his father loved.’

Banastre came from a traditional Catholic family, and his father, Lawrence Banastre, had been committed to the Tower of London in 1572 following the arrest and execution of his patron, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, for his part in a plot to replace Queen Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots.

Despite Lawrence Banastre’s subsequent release, his family remained under suspicion, at least until his death in 1588.

During Robert Banastre’s decoration of Saint Guthlac’s Church, 22-year-old John Hall as rector in 1632. Hall was a recent graduate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, when William Laud was the Chancellor of Oxford University, and remained at Passenham for over 20 years.

The altar in Saint Guthlac’s Church, Passenham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Guthlac’s Church was part of Banastre’s church-building in the Diocese of Peterborough, and of a wider construction programme in Passenham that included a rectory, a large barn and a manor house.

Banastre began this work in Passenham at the time of his wedding in 1620, and he completed it after Charles I ascended the throne 400 years ago in 1625. He died in 1649, and his monument in Saint Guthlac’s usurps the place of Saint Mark among the four evangelists on the south wall of the chancel. But the wall paintings survived both the iconoclasm of the Puritans during the Cromwellian era and the Protestant reordering of the church in the 18th century, albeit under layers of whitewash that had the effect of protecting and preserving the paintings for the next 180 years.

There is no surviving evidence of Sir Robert Banastre’s personal piety or artistic sophistication; perhaps he was motivated merely by a desire to impress the king; perhaps he was inspired by both the Catholic faith of father’s family and the religious and strongly royalist sympathies of his wife Margaret Hopton.

Whatever his motivation and inspiration were, Robin Goodfellow sees the decoration of Saint Guthlac’s as an example of the survival of ‘the beauty of holiness’ in action, and in it a unique record of and monument to English Christianity before, during and after the civil wars in the mid-17th century.

Climbing the steps in the tower of Saint Guthlac’s Church in Passenham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Further Reading:

Robin Goodfellow, ‘Robert Banastre and the Beautification of Passenham Church’, Ecclesiology Today (issue 63, December 2024).

Robin Goodfellow, Robert Banastre and the Beautification of Passenham Church (privately published 2024, 24 pp).