All Saints, Margaret Street | |
---|---|
Denomination | Church of England |
Churchmanship | Anglo-Catholic |
Website | allsaintsmargaretstreet.org.uk |
History | |
Consecrated | 1859 |
Architecture | |
Heritage designation | Grade I |
Architect(s) | William Butterfield |
Style | Gothic Revival |
Administration | |
Province | Canterbury |
Diocese | London |
Clergy | |
Bishop(s) | Jonathan Baker |
Vicar(s) | Peter Anthony |
Laity | |
Director of music | Stephen Farr |
All Saints, Margaret Street, is a Grade I listed Anglo-Catholic church in London. The church was designed by the architect William Butterfield and built between 1850 and 1859. It has been hailed as Butterfield's masterpiece[1] and a pioneering building of the High Victorian Gothic style that would characterize British architecture from around 1850 to 1870.[2]
The church is situated on the north side of Margaret Street in Fitzrovia, near Oxford Street, within a small courtyard. Two other buildings face onto this courtyard: one is the vicarage and the other (formerly a choir school) now houses the parish room and flats for assistant priests.
All Saints is noted for its architecture, style of worship, and musical tradition.
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William Butterfield, All Saints, Margaret Street
Transcription
(piano playing) Steven: I'm with Ayla Lepine, an architectural historian from the Courtauld Institute and we're in central London looking at All Saints Church, Margaret Street and I thought we would explore this building as a way of understanding High Victorian Gothic architecture. Ayla: Standing in the courtyard, the spire as you look up is incredibly tall, one of the tallest in London, and it was built from a group of Church of England people who were trying to restore a sense of spiritual pride for the entire nation. Steven: It's so close to us. Ayla: Even when this building was first conceived of in the late 1840's, this area of central London was very built up and so William Butterfield, the architect, had to think very strategically about how he would include a courtyard space, a full church with a grand nave and a large sanctuary, and everything required for this wonderful manifestation of the medieval world brought into modern London in this really teeny tiny confined area. Steven: So the exterior of the church, these different colored bricks. This lovely deep red and then these lines of black brick offset with this limestone. Ayla: This is something called structural polychromy. Steven: That means the polychromy, this decoration, is not on the surface but is actually the materials that are supporting the building itself. Ayla: Being outside in this confined, riotously decorative courtyard is foreshadowing because we know that when we get into the church the colors will be even more bold, even more intense and the materials will be even more diverse. Steven: This reminds me of the cathedral in Siena. There's these alternating horizontal bands. Ayla: In the early 1850's, when this building was being designed, there was an incredibly important critic and writer who was working on making medieval Italy important for Victorian architects. Steven: Presuming you're speaking about Ruskin, a critic who spent a few years focusing on architecture and was responsible for laying down a series of ideas about what true architecture should be. That the Gothic revivals to date in England had really missed the point. Ayla: Absolutely. What he believes is that in order to build honestly and to build sensitively for a new age you have to look back to the past. And instead of looking back to England's past specifically, he looks back to continental Europe. Both in terms of materials and techniques and in terms of a sense of medieval piety. Steven: So there was a sense that there was a kind of authentic life that had been lost in our new industrial culture? Ayla: Certainly and Ruskin was also a major critic of industrializationing. Steven: But it's one thing to have a theorist, a critic, developing these ideas, it's another thing to have them made real. To find somebody who's willing to put up the money, to find people who want to worship in that kind of environment. So what's happening in England that allows for this to actually come to fruition? Ayla: In the 1830's something called the Oxford Movement begins, unimaginatively enough in Oxford, with a small group of academics who are convinced that the Church of England really needs to be revivified and they look to times before the Reformation. Steven: So looking back to Catholic traditions- Ayla: And even earlier, to the Church fathers who are in the first centuries of Christianity. And it starts off as a very intellectual movement, it's about theology. But then later in the 1830's, a group of men in Cambridge begin to think about how art and architecture of the middle ages can help to promote that earlier Oxford vision. So it comes out of those two universities and eventually that group in Cambridge become the Ecclesiological Society. Steven: And they're ideological sponsors of this building. Ayla: Like A.J. Beresford Hope, who's also a politician and who's a very important writer and thinker in his own right, who puts up the money to create All Saints Margaret Street behind us. Steven: All right, well let's go in and take a look. We've walked into the church. It's beautiful, quiet, dark space. I'm seeing inlaid stone and tile, so how is image and ritual related? Ayla: This building is certainly about the word and it's about scripture but it's also about the east end of the building. It's about the sanctuary. So it's much more focused on what happens on the high altar on the bread and the wine and on what's called the revelation of Christ to humanity, so it's about meeting God in a much more multisensory, full body way. And that's so much of the reason why the visual is so important and telling stories is so important in this building. Steven: The Eucharist does seem like the perfect fulcrum of these ideas. The spiritual made physical. This is a kind of sensory kaleidoscope. Ayla: The ornament and the pattern is most concentrated at the east end of the church where the altar is and also a low but very heavy stone screen which is inspired by John Ruskin's ideas in the Stones of Venice which seems in one way to separate the congregation from all of the special things that are happening in the sanctuary where the bread and wine will be broken and then distributed but it also highlights it. Steven: That screen reminds me of Santa Sabina in Rome, that really old basilica church. Ayla: Because Santa Sabina is such an early example of Christian architecture, it is a real source of inspiration for Victorian architects. You were mentioning authenticity before and what this building is trying to do is genuinely capture all the generations of Christian history, right from the first century. Steven: As we approach the east end of the church, the light came in through this clear story and the sanctuary is now much brighter. Ayla: Instead of having big windows on the ground floor they're actually up above the main arcades on either side. So we have a sense of light descending from above with all of the kind of divine symbolism that comes along with that. It's a very typical way of introducing light in a medieval building. Now what we can see on the east wall is the life of Christ. Steven: Very historicized like the building itself. This is clearly a kind of Victorian conception of 14th century Italian art. Ayla: In the 1840's, when this building was conceived, William Dyce, a very famous Victorian painter, was invited by the patron and by Butterfield, the architect, to paint saints and the life of Christ on the east wall. This deteriorated and soon afterwards, John Ninian Comper repainted Dyce's work in his own style. Comper loved early Italian Renaissance painting. Steven: I want to go back to the artist Dyce for a moment. I'm thinking about some of Dyce's landscape paintings like Pegwell Bay for example, which shows his family picking up perhaps shells and a kind of interest in the natural world, in natural science and yet to think of him in this context, painting the spiritual, there lies an interesting tension in the 19th century between the development of Darwinian thinking, geologic time, and then here, spiritual understanding, spiritual time. Ayla: Actually there was a much more integrated way of thinking about God and science in the mid-Victorian period. Steven: In this church there's stone that was chosen that actually includes fossils. Ayla: Yes, and that screen that we were talking about before, the step that everyone would have to step onto in order to get into the sanctuary and in order to participate in that giving of the bread and the wine. And we can also see it in the top most element of the screen and so the passage of geological time is present even in this most holy threshold of the building. The other place where we can see it is at the font. Steven: The baptismal font. There is something that is awesome and overwhelming when one thinks about the time that this stone represents and you see the creatures that are embedded within it. The mathematical precision of science and spirituality, the infinite come together. Ayla: In the mid-19th century Victorians were struggling with what the discoveries that they were making really might mean. (piano playing)
History
All Saints had its origins in the Margaret Street Chapel which had stood on the site since the 1760s. The chapel had "proceeded upwards through the various gradations of Dissent and Low-Churchism"[3] until 1829, when the Tractarian William Dodsworth became its incumbent. Dodsworth later converted to Roman Catholicism,[4] as did one of his successors, Frederick Oakeley. Before his resignation from the post, Oakeley, who was later to describe the chapel as "a complete paragon of ugliness"[3] had conceived the idea of rebuilding the chapel in what he considered a correct ecclesiastical style, and had collected a sum of almost £3,000 for the purpose.[5] He was succeeded at the chapel by his assistant William Upton Richards.[6]
In 1845, Alexander Beresford Hope realised that the chapel rebuilding scheme could be combined with the project of the Cambridge Camden Society to found a model church. His proposal met with the approval of Upton Richards, George Chandler, rector of All Souls, and Charles James Blomfield, the Bishop of London. It was decided that the architectural and ecclesiological aspects of the project would be put entirely under the control of the Cambridge Camden Society, who appointed Sir Stephen Glynne and Beresford Hope to oversee the work. In the event, Glynne was unable to take an active part, and Beresford Hope took sole charge.[5]
William Butterfield was selected as the architect and the site in Margaret Street purchased for £14,500.[5] The last service at the old chapel was held on Easter Monday, 1850, and the foundation stone of the new building was laid on All Saints' Day of that year by Edward Bouverie Pusey. Services were held in a temporary chapel in Titchfield Street for the next nine years, until the new church was finally consecrated on 28 May 1859.[7] The total cost of the church, including the site and endowments was around £70,000; several large individual donations helped to fund it.[5]
Architecture
All Saints marked a new stage in the development of the Gothic Revival in English architecture. The author and columnist Simon Jenkins called All Saints "architecturally England's most celebrated Victorian church",[8] and the architectural historian Simon Thurley listed All Saints among the ten most important buildings in the country.[9]
The design of the church showed Butterfield (in Sir John Betjeman's words) "going on from where the Middle Ages left off" as a neo-Gothic architect.[10] Previous architecture of the 19th-century Gothic Revival had copied medieval buildings. But Butterfield departed considerably from medieval Gothic practice, especially by using new materials like brick. Charles Locke Eastlake, the 19th-century architect and writer, wrote that Butterfield's design was "a bold and magnificent endeavour to shake off the trammels of antiquarian precedent, which had long fettered the progress of the Revival, to create not a new style, but a development of previous styles".[5] The Victorian critic John Ruskin wrote after seeing All Saints: "Having done this, we may do anything; ... and I believe it to be possible for us, not only to equal, but far to surpass, in some respects, any Gothic yet seen in Northern countries."[11]
Butterfield's use of building materials was innovative. All Saints is built of brick, in contrast to Gothic Revival churches of the 1840s, typically built of grey Kentish ragstone.[8] At All Saints, Butterfield felt a mission to "give dignity to brick",[12] and the quality of the brick he chose made it more expensive than stone.[5] The exterior of All Saints employs red brick, heavily banded and patterned with black brick, with bands of stone and carved elements in the gate, the church wall and spire. Decoration is therefore built into the structure, making All Saints the first example of 'structural polychromy' in London.[13]
All Saints is particularly celebrated for its interior decoration. Every surface is richly patterned or decorated; the floor in diaper patterned tiles, wall surfaces in geometrical patterned brick, tile, and marble, as well as tiles with painted decoration, large friezes executed in painted tiles, a painted ceiling, and painted and gilded timberwork behind the altar. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the interior as "dazzling, though in an eminently High Victorian ostentatiousness or obtrusiveness. ... No part of the walls is left undecorated. From everywhere the praise of the Lord is drummed into you."[14]
The rear of the chancel features a series of paintings on gilded boards, within a delicately carved brightly patterned gothic screen, the work of Ninian Comper and a restoration of earlier work by William Dyce. The decoration of the Lady Chapel is also by Comper. The north wall is dominated by a large ceramic tile frieze designed by Butterfield, painted by Alexander Gibbs, and fired by Henry Poole and Sons, installed in 1873. It depicts a variety of scenes from the Old Testament, a central Nativity scene and depictions of Early Church Fathers.[15]
The stained-glass windows are limited in All Saints due to the density of buildings around the church. The original windows were designed by Alfred Gérente (1821–1868) but his work was not held in high regard and was subsequently replaced. The large west window, which was originally fitted with glass by Gerente in 1853–58, was replaced in 1877 with a design by Alexander Gibbs based on the Tree of Jesse window in Wells Cathedral. The glass in the clerestory dates from 1853 and is the work of Michael O'Connor, who also designed the east window of the south chancel aisle which depicts Christ in Majesty with St Edward Martyr and St Augustine.[16]
The baptistery in the south-west corner of the church is noted for its marble tiling which features an image of the Pelican in her Piety in the ceiling tiles, a symbol of the fall and redemption of man.[17]
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The Nativity Scene in the tiled frieze
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Baptistery tiling
The reredos, by Butterfield, was moved to St Catherine's Church, Wickford, at some time during the 20th century.[18]
Anglo-Catholicism
The church's style of worship is Anglo-Catholic, "the Catholic faith as taught by the Church of England", offering members and visitors a traditional style of liturgy, as advocated by the Oxford Movement of the mid-nineteenth century, including ritual, choir and organ music, vestments and incense.
As a traditional Anglo-Catholic parish, All Saints passed a resolution under the House of Bishops' Declaration on 26 November 2016 (affirmed on 13 July 2020[19]) to ask that episcopal and priestly sacramental ministry in the parish be exercised by male bishops at whose consecration a male bishop presided and who stand in the historic, apostolic succession of bishops so ordained, and by male priests ordained by such bishops.[20] It receives alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Fulham (since 2013, Jonathan Baker).
Incumbents
- 1859–1873 William Upton Richards
- 1873–1886 Berdmore Compton
- 1886–1905 William Allen Whitworth
- 1905–1908 George Frederick Holden
- 1908–1934 Henry Falconar Barclay Mackay
- 1934–1942 Dom Bernard Clements OSB
- 1943–1951 Cyril Edric Tomkinson
- 1951–1969 Kenneth Needham Ross
- 1969–1975 Michael Eric Marshall
- 1976–1981 David Alan Sparrow
- 1982–1985 David Michael Hope
- 1986–1995 David Handley Hutt
- 1995–2019 Leslie Alan Moses
- 2021–present Peter Benedict Anthony
Services
- Sunday
- High Mass at 11.00 am
- Low Mass at 5.15 pm
- Solemn Evensong and Benediction at 6.00 pm
- Monday to Friday
- Low Mass at 12 noon and 6.30 pm
- Confessions by appointment
- Saturday
- Low Mass at 12 noon and 6.30 pm (first Mass of Sunday)
- Rosary at 12 noon on the second Saturday of the month (Walsingham cell)
- Weekday Solemnities (please see notices)
- High Mass at 6.30pm
Music
A choir school was established at the church in 1843, which provided music for daily choral services. The choir was widely recognised for its excellence and choristers sang at the Coronations of Edward VII (1902), George V (1911), George VI (1937) and Elizabeth II (1953) as well as at Victoria's Jubilees (1887 and 1897). Amongst its alumni is Laurence Olivier. The school closed in 1968,[21] at which point the boys' voices were replaced by adult sopranos. The survival of the choir school had been discussed many years earlier. Writing to parishioners in 1894, the vicar lamented that the changing demography of the area meant that there were now few children left in the parish, and that the number of wealthy patrons in the congregation had decreased as they moved further west.[22]
The present-day choir maintains the exacting standards of its predecessors.
The repertoire for choir and organ stretches from before the Renaissance to the 21st century and includes several pieces commissioned for the church, most famously Walter Vale's arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and All-Night Vigil for Western-Rite Mass and Evensong respectively. Rachmaninoff heard Vale's adaptations during his two visits to the church, in 1915 and 1923, and pronounced his approval of them. They are still sung on Palm Sunday.
All Saints' organ is a superb four-manual Harrison and Harrison instrument with 65 speaking stops, built in 1910 to a specification drawn up by Walter Vale. It retains the best of the pipework of its predecessor, the original and considerably smaller Hill organ. Though as big as those found in most cathedrals, it is perfectly tailored to All Saints' smaller dimensions – powerful, but not excessively so, sounding intimate when played quietly, and monumental when loud. Harrison rebuilt it in 1957, replacing the tubular pneumatic action with electro-pneumatic. Electrical blowers replaced the hydraulic blowing plant.
The tonal changes made to 10 stops in 1957 – like those made to many other organs at that time – altered the tone of the instrument, to a very limited extent, to a more 'classical' sound. Therefore, when the organ next required major restoration work, the decision was taken to try to restore the sound nearer to that of 1910: to return it to an 'Edwardian Romantic' organ. The completed restoration was celebrated with two inauguration concerts in March 2003.
Organists have included Richard Redhead, the first organist and remembered today as the composer of Rock of Ages and Bright the Vision, Walter Vale (1907–1939), William Lloyd Webber (1939–1948), John Birch (1953–58), Michael Fleming (1958–68) and Harry Bramma (1989–2004), many of whom wrote music for use at All Saints and beyond.
- Directors of Music (selected)
- 1839–1864 Richard Redhead[23]
- 1860–1868 Christopher Edwin Willing
- 1868–1907 William Stevenson Hoyte
- 1907–1939 Walter S. Vale
- 1939–1948 William Lloyd Webber
- 1949–1951 John Williams[24]
- 1952–1953 Garth Benson
- 1953–1958 John Birch
- 1958–1968 Michael Fleming
- 1968–1988 (James) Eric Arnold
- 1988–1989 Murray Stewart
- 1989–2004 Harry Bramma
- 2004–2013 Paul Brough[25]
- 2013–2018 Timothy Byram-Wigfield
- 2020–present Stephen Farr
See also
References
- ^ Betjeman, John (2011). Betjeman's Best British Churches (New ed.). London: Collins. p. 418. ISBN 978-0-00-741567-0.
- ^ Watkin, David (1979). English Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson. pp. 165. ISBN 0-500-20171-4.
- ^ a b Oakeley, Frederick (1865). Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.
- ^ Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
- ^ a b c d e f Eastlake, Charles Locke (1872). A History of the Gothic Revival. London: Longmans, Green & Co. pp. 251–253. Retrieved 26 December 2011.
- ^ Galloway, Peter (1999). A Passionate Humility: Frederick Oakeley and the Oxford Movement. Gracewing Publishing. p. 52. ISBN 9780852445068.
- ^ Wakeling, G. (1895). The Oxford Church Movement: Sketches and Reflections. London: Swan Sonnenschein. pp. 95–96.
- ^ a b Jenkins, Simon (2009). England's Thousand Best Churches. London: Penguin Books. pp. 479–480. ISBN 978-0-141-03930-5.
- ^ Thurley, Simon (5 January 2014), "The ten most important buildings in England", The Daily Telegraph, retrieved 24 April 2014
- ^ Betjeman, John (1970). A Pictorial History of English Architecture. London: George Rainbird. p. 83. ISBN 0-7195-2640-X.
- ^ Ruskin, John (2007). The Stones of Venice, Volume III: The Fall. New York: Cosimo. p. 196. ISBN 978-1-60206-703-5.
- ^ All Saints, Margaret Street. Norwich: Jarrold. 2005. p. 6.
- ^ Hitchcock, Henry Russell (1977). Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Pelican History of Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. pp. 247–248. ISBN 0-14-056115-3.
- ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus (1974). The Buildings of England: London 2, except the cities of London and Westminster. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. p. 327. ISBN 0-14-071006-X.
- ^ "Tiling". All Saints Margaret Street website. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
- ^ "Stained Glass Windows". All Saints Margaret Street website. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
- ^ "Inside the Church". All saints Margaret Street website. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
- ^ Historic England. "Church of St Catherine (Grade II) (1338415)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Pastoral Letter from the Bishops" (PDF). ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET. 22 July 2020. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
- ^ "Information Pack for discussionson the Resolution: ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET RESOLUTION" (PDF). ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET. 29 November 2016. Retrieved 22 July 2020.
- ^ Crutchley, Leigh (5 November 1968). "Death of a Choir School: All Saints Margaret Street London 1968". BBC Radio. Archived from the original on 22 December 2021. Retrieved 3 May 2018.
- ^ "All Saints', Margaret Street choir school". The Guardian. 24 October 1894. p. 1650 – via newspapers.com.
- ^ Love, James (1841) Scottish Church Music: its Composers and Sources. Edinburgh: Blackwood; p. 233
- ^ John Williams: obituary[dead link] The Independent
- ^ "The Choir". All Saints Margaret Street website. Retrieved 26 May 2012.
Further reading
- Almedingen, E. M. (1945) Dom Bernard Clements: a portrait. London: John Lane
External links
- All Saints Margaret Street
51°31′02.10″N 00°08′20.64″W / 51.5172500°N 0.1390667°W