A visit to All Souls church, Langham Place

This is the church that often appears in the background of outdoor broadcasts from the BBC’s Broadcasting House, although you might not have realised that tall stone spire is a church at all.

It’s also the last surviving church designed by John Nash, is coming up to its 200th birthday, and has its rector appointed by the Prime Minister (sort of). Less appealingly, the services are in the conservative evangelical style which doesn’t really approve of the gays or the women.

Back to the architecture, the church was commissioned as an eye-catching monument at the point where Regent Street, newly laid out as part of Nash’s scheme to link Piccadilly with the new Regent’s Park, bends to align with the pre-existing Portland Place.

The most obvious design choice is the frontage, which is almost a throwback to old Templar churches which were built in the round, with the spired circular vestibule with wedding-cake style columns running up two tiers of the entrance.

Behind the distinctive entrance, the church becomes rather mundane. It consists of a simple rectangular box in a classic Georgian style, with an upper row and simple but very high-quality decoration around the edges.

However, what you’re looking at is not the 200-year-old original but something that’s barely 50 years old.

The church was badly damaged during WWII, and it took a decade to fully repair it again. However, having only recently finished rebuilding, in 1975, they gutted the entire church down to the bare walls and rebuilt it with a raised floor above a newly excavated basement space.

That is why, and it’s not obvious until pointed out — that the windows on the ground floor are so low down and close to the floor. The floor is higher than it used to be.

A few other points, the marble columns turned out to be painted rather than actual marble and the carpets showed the tell-tale black marks of people chewing gum during services and littering the carpet. There are also an unusually large number of lighting rigs along the gallery, almost as if this is a theatre rather than a church — which is because it’s often used for concerts.

A quirk of the church is that the Prime Minister appoints the rector, as it has links with the Crown Estate which owns the land around the church. Of course, it’s rather complicated, as the Prime Minister will be presented with two names by the Church of England, who, by convention, always chooses the top name on the list, which is then passed to the King to confirm and then the diocese’s College of Canons elects the new rector.

So in fact, it’s the Church of England who decides — but there’s a long winded constitutional fudge to make it look like the Prime Minister decides.

All Souls will mark its 200th anniversary in November 2024.