Until fairly recently, there was a large plot of empty land in central London, sealed off, and incongruously, a small church sat alone in the wasteland.
In 1778, a new chapel opened on the edges of the City of London for the new Christian movement known as the Methodists, and it’s still there, just down the road from Old Street tube station, with a museum in its basement.
Just behind Debenhams on Oxford Street can be found a building that looks like a church, but isn’t. A building that was consecrated, but not as a church, even though it is used for worship.
A large church stands on the corner opposite the Old Bailey and I have passed its locked gates for rather more years than I care to remember, for church that is open for a few hours each day during the week – has never been open when I am passing.
Although just a couple of minutes walk from the activity of Victoria Street and around the corner from Channel4’s head office, it is a church you would not casually pass unless you had certain reason to use the street it fronts onto.
As Private Eye is wont to say, it’s Grim up North London, but if the eponymous characters of that newspaper were to dart out of their shell, they might find a remarkable building peaking its tall spire above the council estates of Kilburn.
If you approach an old church, mainly in towns and villages rather than cities, you might enter the churchyard through a small wooden gate with a pitched roof. These small gatehouses though have a particularly macabre history, for this is…
Bethnal Green sports two Churches with very notable and yet also very different representations of the Stations of the Cross. Both built within 80 years of each other, yet the older is also the younger, thanks to the after effects…
