St Paul’s Church open weekend

St Paul's Bow Common has been described as 'the most significant church built after WWII in Britain' - a brutalist, inclusive and influential signpost for future church design. An architectural gem in the middle of the East End of London.

In the 1950s there was a radical re-evaluation in progress far and wide among churches and architects alike, as to what exactly the purpose and function of a church is and how its confirmation should express its deepest purposes. The creators of this church - the late Robert Maguire (gifted young architect) & the late Keith Murray (designer) and the late Fr Gresham Kirkby (radical young vicar) proudly regarded themselves as purposeful rebels. In 2010 Robert Maguire wrote 'We were trying to build a church which. would encourage true relationships in the liturgy.

The roots and antecedents of this building's design run deep - to classical forms and the Renaissance Revival - to the fundamental geometry of square and circle - influences owning a debt to Brunelleschi, Palladio, Bramante - and further back, to the churches of Torcellos, to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and to the great Pantheon in Rome.

The mosaics (reportedly the largest in Britain by a single artist) are the work of Charles Lutyens (great-nephew of Edwin Lutyens).

In form, the building is basically a stack of three demising cubes with ancillary spaces added at the sides. Maguire and Murray's defining geometry was that of two bounded areas - contained by the exterior and barely broken bounding walls and also by the inner 'transparent' but the effective encircling line of colonnades. At the centre is the high altar sitting below a glass lantern which cascades the area with light.