Visiting St Mary’s church Osterley

A short walk from Osterley tube station is this neo-gothic church, built when all around here were just fields and weren’t called Osterley.

This is St Mary’s Osterley, built by the property developer Henry Daniel Davies, who built the Spring Grove estate of which it formed a part. When the church was built, this part of the estate was still fields, with just a few streets but no houses.

The intention was that houses, for suitable mostly retired army officers, would follow quickly, but the housing development failed to develop as intended, and the church has always been short of parishioners. The Illustrated London News described it as the sort of countryside where professional men could adopt the new custom of residing a few miles from their places of business in the city – the origins of the commuter class.

The church was built from Bath stone facings rather than solid stone, in a technique which was described as being new at the time.

Inside, the church was built with the expectation of expansion, with the structure for upper seating galleries to be added later. That is why the usually floor-to-ceiling windows in the church have the unusual split design, with two smaller arched windows above each other.

The galleries have never been added.

The church was consecrated as St Mary Spring Grove on 3rd December 1856 by the Bishop of London, and its audience was considerably larger than the local populace could have mustered on its own.

The church organ, supplied later, came from Gray and Davidson.

Most churches have a list of vicars who have presided there, but this one has a wall of photos, ranging from the first stern Victorian gentlemen to slow hints of smiles appearing until finally they still properly in the 1950s — and currently, shock, horror — a lady vicar, with her cat no less.

The church, once sitting in the nearly empty countryside and expected to be surrounded by quiet, genteel houses, didn’t reckon with future developments. The main change here being the construction of the perpetual noise machine that’s the Great West Road just a hundred yards or so to the north of the church.

The area also largely lost its name of Spring Grove when the nearby Osterley Park and Spring Grove station on the Piccadilly line was moved in 1934 to the nearby newly built and shorter named Osterley station. It was also around this time that St Mary Spring Grove became St Mary’s Osterley.