OUR STORY
The Story of St. Bartholomew’s Church and Parish
The present church was built 1903-04 to the designs of the eminent Arts & Crafts architect William Douglas Caroë (1857-1938). The architectural historian Pevsner describes the building as, ‘full of free Perpendicular detail and careful craftsmanship’ – it is indeed an exquisite and intimate work of architecture and design. The history of St. Bartholomew, dating back nearly 800 years, is unusual in that the church has been built and rebuilt five times and has stood in three different locations in London.
Little St. Bartholomew
The first church, called Little St. Bartholomew, is known to have exited since 1225. It had the name Little to distinguish it from the two other City churches of the same dedication, St. Bartholomew the Great and St. Bartholomew the Less, both in Smithfield. Little ST. Bartholomew was located in the heart of the City next to where the Bank of England was later built. This first church was re-founded and endowed by King Edward III in 1349 who gave it to his great monastic foundation of the Abbey of ST. Mary of Grace that was beside the Tower of London. Little St. Bartholomew was rebuilt in 1438 in the Perpendicular style of red bricks with stone dressingst. It is this second church that is believed to be the inspiration for Caroe’s designs in 1903. King Edward’s foundation of the Abbey of ST. Mary of Grace was a Royal Free Chapel and by the sixteenth-century it had become the third richest Cistercian community in Britain. However, in 1539 the abbey was dissolved and the patronage of ST. Bartholomew passing from the Abbot to the King. Since the reign of King Henry VIII the parish has remained been under the patronage of the Crown.
King Edward III Founder and Benefactor of Little S. Bartholomew
During the sixteenth-century the church became closely associated with the reforming and protestant movement. Sir William Capel, Lord Mayor of London, paid for substantial repairs to the church – Capel was an influential reformer. By marriage his family was joined with William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester and Lord Chamberlain. Paulet, though once a supporter of Cardinal Wolsey, had later led King Henry’s forces against the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement that had sought to uphold the Catholic faith. With such high placed associates St. Bartholomew’s became a noted centre for the preaching and practice of the new reformed religion. In his later and most radical years Bishop Miles Coverdale, one of England’s key reformers, frequently preached at St. Bartholomew. He chose to be buried in the church, albeit that he had been the rector of the nearby parish of S. Magnus-the-Martyr. Coverdale had been an Augustinian Friar but by the 1520s was a keen reformer, especially of the liturgy being celebrated in English rather than Latin. In 1535 he translated the Bible into English for purposes of printing, thus producing the first printed Bible in English, the so-called Coverdale Bible. His legacy to the Church has been great; it is his translations of the Psalms that were later used in The Book of Common Prayer, and his translation into English of the Roman Canon that was in 1980 authorized by Pope Saint John Paul II as the Roman Catholic, Anglican Use.
By the seventeenth-century the patronage of King James I and King Charles I influenced the parish away from the radical reformers with the appointment of High Church rectors. Notable among these High Churchmen was Dr John Grant, Rector 1623-1644 and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. While Grant was the parish priest the church was restored and beautified according to the principles of the Caroline divines (those Anglicans who during the reign of King Charles I sought to emphasise the Catholic nature of the Church of England). The altar was returned to the east end of the church, raised on steps and railed-in, kneelers were placed throughout the church – all of this emphasised the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist and the ‘beauty of holiness’. The numbers receiving Holy Communion increased, as did those being catechised (being taught the faith). However, Grant and his parishioners were working in an atmosphere of growing tension as the puritans started to asset their presence in London. The puritan aim was to rid the Church of all priests and bishops, all altars and all existing liturgies. One of the puritans’ strategies for spreading their teaching was to appoint lecturers, often non-ordained ministers, to parishes. These lecturers would preach puritan beliefs – such a strategy was imposed upon St. Bartholomew.
Dr Grant was forced to cease ministering in the parish in 1644, although he managed to remain living in the rectory for another two years until he was deprived of that too. Into the parish were intruded a series of lecturers. First came Dr John Lighfoot, Master of S. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, his appointment to St. Bartholomew gave him a pulpit in London while he attended the puritan Westminster Assembly. His Erastian views proved even too radical for the Assembly; he believed that the Church should be subject to the State and the State should punish sin. He soon left London and in 1650 was appointed Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University. He was followed as minister by Thomas Cawton a puritan yet who supported King Charles. Although he was fined for it, Cawton permitted the royal arms of King Charles I to remain hanging in St. Bartholomew during the Commonwealth regime and two days after the King’s martyrdom he openly prayed for King Charles II. Fearing puritan retaliation Cawton fled into exile to Rotterdam. Oliver Cromwell himself appointed the next minister – Sidrach Simpson, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Although Simpson was minister of St. Bartholomew for two years he hardly spent any time in the parish. His first act as minister was to preach a sermon denouncing Cromwell for which he was arrested and imprisoned in Windsor Castle. In 1655 Dr George Hall was appointed lecturer. He had been Archdeacon of Cornwall but had been deprived for a while by the Parliamentarians; at the Restoration of the monarchy he returned to an active ministry as a priest and was consecrated Bishop of Chester in 1662.
By 1655, Cromwell’s puritan regime was starting to falter and it can be recognised in the parish minute books (the minutes of the church’s vestry) that the parishioners were feeling more confident in their opposition to the puritans. The next minister imposed upon the parish was Philip Nye and he appointed his locum John Loder to St. Bartholomew. The period of 1655 -1660 were ones of continuous dispute. Loder would not celebrate the Holy Communion nor baptise children, and so the vestry would not pay him and, it would seem, would not attend his services. Finally, the vestry had his appointment annulled in early 1660 but just in case he should return and attempt to preach they paid a carpenter to remove the stairs to the pulpit, and should he manage to get into the pulpit, the carpenter removed the pulpit door too, so that Loder could be easily pulled out! All of this though was happily unnecessary as King Charles II returned to London in May 1660 and the following month the King appointed Dr Ralph Brideoake, who had been High Master of Manchester Free School but deprived for his Royalist sympathies, as Rector.
St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange
During the late sixteenth-century the locality of the parish had developed from a commercial area of retailers into the City’s financial district. It was at this time that the church came to be known as St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange. In 1565 Sir Thomas Gresham had built a commercial exchange in the parish, imitating that in Antwerp. Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to the exchange in 1571, creating the Royal Exchange – the beginnings of the Square Mile. The parish occupied one of the wealthiest areas of the City and this wealth is seen in the sumptuous silver and gilt church plate that was commissioned in the 1660s to replace that lost during the Commonwealth. (This plate is now in the care of S. Margaret, Lothbury.)
St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange in 1837
Dr Ralph Brideoake, who was also Rector of Standish and Dean of Salisbury while Rector of St. Bartholomew, saw two great disasters come to the parish. During the 1660s successive waves of the plague struck London. The parish consisted at this time of just 600 people and in one year alone 92 parishioners died. It was the responsibility of the churchwardens and clerk to ‘mark’ the houses that had been visited by the plague, and they had to oversee the collection and speedy burial of the dead. The parish accounts also show expenses for whipping – a brutal measure to deter vagrancy; it was vagrancy that was thought to be the means by which the plague was carried about. The second catastrophe was the Great Fire of London in 1666. The church burnt down, save for the tower. Brideoake became Bishop of Chichester in 1675 and was followed by Dr John Sharp who was later Archbishop of York.
Archbishop John Sharp
The third church building of St. Bartholomew was the work of Sir Christopher Wren who oversaw the reconstruction 1674-83. The new church covered the footprint of the old and very unusually for Wren included a long chancel and a side chapel, thus recreating the shape of a mediaeval church. The base of the tower that had survived the Great Fire was retained. The rebuilding cost £5077.
Pulpit carved by William Cheere, 1680
St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange was demolished in 1841 though the fittings were retained; the pulpit and the font in the present St. Bartholomew on Stamford Hill are those of the Wren rebuilding. They are exuberant works in the extravagant English Baroque style of Grinlin Gibbons. The carver of the pulpit and font was William Cheere, who was Sir Christopher Wren’s chief joiner. The font cover was restored in 2012. The bell is also from St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange and when it was cleaned in 2013 we discovered the words, ‘Anthony Bartlett Made Me 1676’ and the arms of the Whitechapel bell foundry.
Ms Josephine Lawrence, Trini, the benefactress of the restored bell
The Bell with the foundry mark for Whitechapel and date of 1674
After Wren’s rebuilding, and for the next 150 years, St. Bartholomew served the wealthy merchants and financiers of central London. Her rectors often held the living in plurality as the parish provided a lucrative stipend and curates carried out the actual ministry in the parish. Dr Benjamin Woodroffe, Rector 1687-1711 was also Principal of Gloucester Hall, Oxford (later Worcester College). He followed Dr John Sharp as Rector and the two of them set up The Greek College in Oxford, an ecumenical venture to provide Greek Orthodox Christians access to an English university.
The Wren Font and Cheere cover of 1680
By the nineteenth-century the parish had changed beyond all recognition from its original mediaeval founding. The geographical area of the parish was always small, consisting of just five streets and alleys. When the Bank of England was constructed in the 1820s it took up many of the residential properties. In 1838 plans were formed to rebuild and expand the Royal Exchange and widen Threadneedle Street – the Corporation of London petitioned for the demolition of St. Bartholomew.
Wall plaque beside the Bank of England
In 1840 the church was demolished, with it would seem, little comment. John Carlos, editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine lamented, ‘The apathy with which the removal of St. Bartholomew’s Church will be remembered and felt when perhaps the loss of this church will be found a trifle in comparison with the wholesale destruction to which, ere long, the churches of the metropolis may chance to be destined.’ But its demolition was not the end of the church. In an extraordinary piece of Victorian engineering St. Bartholomew was almost completely rebuilt in Moorfield, on the edge of the City, an area that remained very populous. The replica church was built to the designs of Charles Cockerell and contained many of the fittings from the previous building.
St. Bartholomew, Moor Lane
St. Bartholomew, Moor Lane was completed in 1850. A new set of church plate was commissioned, chalices, pattens and flagon by the designer William Butterfield (1814 – 1900). The plate is an early example of gothic revival in church plate. (See here for separate article.) These were, in time, taken to Stamford Hill along with the church chest and its contents and a set of altar rails. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel presented the newly refounded church with a set of folio service books – these the present church still retains.
Folio edition of The Book of Common Prayer still used at St. Bartholomew’s
William Butterfield and John Keith flagon, 1852
St. Bartholomew had long been associated with the High Church tradition and at Moor Lane the parish became distinctly Anglo-Catholic. From the pulpit, John Keble (1792 – 1866 and commemorated in the Anglican calendar on 29 March), one of the founders of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, delivered his last sermon, and the church was one of only a very few where Fr Ignatius OSB (1837 – 1908, otherwise The Revd Joseph Leycester Lyne) preached. Fr Ignatius had revived the Benedictine Order in the Church of England but was unpopular with the Church’s establishment for his advanced Catholic views. He was curate of the parish for a year – the only licence he ever held in the Church of England. The monastery he founded in Wales at Llanthony is still a place of pilgrimage.
The Reverend Deacon Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837 – 1908), otherwise Fr Ignatius OSB
St. Bartholomew, Moor Lane was to have only a short life. The building of Moorgate Station in 1863 and then its gradual expansion thereafter engulfed much of the parish (as had been the experience in the 1820s when the Bank of England was constructed beside St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange). What was left of the parish was amalgamated into the neighbouring parish of S. Giles, Cripplegate in 1902. St. Bartholomew’s church was demolished and once more she was on the move. The site was sold for the princely sum of £20,400 and the proceeds used to build St. Bartholomew on Stamford Hill between 1903-04.
The St. Alban’s Mission
In 1897 the Bishop of London sent Fr James Goddard to South Tottenham to start a mission. He was assisted by Sister Maud, a deaconess. The Diocesan Board for Mission defined the mission as one to the upper-middle and professional classes, which at the close of the nineteenth-century might still have described the area. The work was called the S. Alban’s Mission and in 1899 a mission hall was built in Stonebridge Road near Seven Sisters. The early success of the mission allowed for the refounding of St. Bartholomew to the area and the formation of a new parish on the north side of Stamford Hill created out of S. John-at-Hackney, S. Anne’s, South Tottenham and Holy Trinity, Tottenham Green. Many of the fittings from the mission hall were transferred to the new St. Bartholomew and remain there today, such as the altar cross, Lady Chapel gradine, litany desk and the chairs throughout the church that display labels stating that all seating is free and not subject to pew rents.
The locality of the parish: Stamford Hill and South Tottenham
The hill stands four miles due north of the City and running over its centre is ancient Ermine Street, the Roman road from London to York. Stamford Hill first developed as a farming hamlet during the Middle Ages. Its name meaning ‘the hill by the sandy ford.’ By the early seventeenth-century the area was being intensively farmed with the location of the present parish coming within manors of Tottenham and Hackney.
The hill’s proximity to the City made it a desirable location for merchants to build large properties. Little remains now of these grand eighteenth-century houses, though occasionally if you look above the shop fronts you will see the remnants of a Georgian house, or you may come across a Regency gate pier but which no longer leads to a sweeping drive. Like Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill became an early suburb especially for those who did not wish to live under the social restrictions that could accompany being a non-Anglican. In the Georgian period many non-conformists lived on the hill, and from the late eighteenth-century the Jewish de Rothschild and the Montefiore families had estates here, starting the tradition of Stamford Hill being the home for many Jews.
A procession of the Torah passing the church
One of these large properties was Markfield House; here lived the Hobson family in the early nineteenth-century. In 1806 the young John Constable joined the household as the drawing tutor. Up until this time Constable’s artistic work had chiefly been as a portraitist, while in South Tottenham he started to sketch the clouds and sky marking a significant change in his artistic development. His Markfield sketchbook is now in the Louvre.
John Constable, self-portrait, 1804, pencil and watercolour
The gentility of the area was disturbed by the frequent presence of highwaymen. On the site of the inn The Turnpike House, located on corner Stamford Hill and Ravensdale Road, was a turnpike where road tolls were charged. As the coaches slowed to go up the hill to the turnpike they offered easy pickings for highwaymen. The infamous Dick Turpin and Tom King made a pact to work together at a meeting in a wood on Stamford Hill, probably very close to where the church and vicarage now stand! To deter this crime a gibbet was set up on the corner of the High Road and S. Anne’s Road (formerly Hangman’s Lane) – or so the local story runs.
The Vicarage, architect William Douglas Caroë, 1903
The locality of the future parish was to start changing after the arrival of the railways, especially after the building of South Tottenham station in 1871 and Stamford Hill station in1872. The older properties and their gardens were sold off for building plots. By the end of the century much of the parish had been built over by terraced housing. Many of the street names recall places in Ireland (Rostrevor, Barry, Ferndale and Ravensdale) indicative of the large numbers of Irish people who were moving into the area. By 1900 north London was home to the largest Irish community outside Ireland. In response to this, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, together with the Jesuits, founded the Parish and College of S. Ignatius in 1897 on the High Road. The church is a great landmark in the area and is built in a distinctively Flemish style. The young Alfred Hitchcock attended the college – his gothic tastes are thought to have been inspired by the church and college.
Jesuit Church of S. Ignatius, Stamford Hill, built in 1894
The Pumping House Museum, Markfield Park, built 1883
St. Bartholomew on Stamford
The story of St. Bartholomew during the twentieth-century was one of a parish serving the ever-changing communities of the locality. The large numbers of Irish people of the early twentieth-century have been replaced by a substantial Jewish community, most of whom are of the orthodox Hassidic tradition. In the 1950s many peoples from the West Indies arrived into the area and then since the late 1990s significant numbers of people from Eastern Europe and South America have arrived. The richness of diversity is unique even for London – in the council ward of Seven Sisters over 300 languages are spoken, the greatest number anywhere in the UK.
Stamford Hill station opened in 1872
What remained of any open land in the parish was build over in the 1920s and 30s with metro-land semis. Several streets were severely damaged by enemy bombs in the Second World War, which is discernable still with the occasional row of 1950s houses. On its eastern boundary the parish meets the River Lea. This navigable river was one of the industrial arteries of London and up until the 1980s a significant amount of manufacture took place in factories along the river. The last of these factories in the parish closed in 2007. The area of Tottenham Hale has been extensively redeveloped since 2010.
The River Lea forms the eastern boundary of the parish
The Catholic ethos of the parish that had developed at St. Bartholomew, Moor Lane was transferred to Stamford Hill and continues to characterise the church. Fr James Tute, Vicar 1956-80 was a keen supporter and pioneer of the modern ecumenical movement. He moved the worshipping life of the church to share as much as possible in common with all Western Christians. St. Bartholomew is very conscious of its ecumenical vocation and during the incumbency of Fr Roderick Leece (1991-2005) a local ecumenical cluster of churches was established. One of the prime objects for the cluster was our joint work for a local child contact centre, which continued until 2017. In accord with our ecumenical vocation the parish opted in 1994 to maintain its belief in the historic faith with regards priestly orders being essentially male. This of course has not prevented us from receiving the ministry of women as lay reader and pastoral assistant. The parish is within the episcopal and pastoral care of the Bishop of Fulham.
The church interior, Easter Day, 2024
From our Edwardian forebears we have inherited a remarkable and beautiful church in the Arts & Crafts style. It has been nationally listed as Grade II* and its maintenance in good order, though a considerable responsibility, is also a matter of pleasure and pride. The architect William Caroë not only designed the building but also many of the fittings and the original vestments, some of which have survived. During the time of the building of St. Bartholomew the noted artist and designer Eric Gill was working with Caroë; Gill carved the dedication stone, which was laid by Sybell, Countess Grosvenor on Ascension Day 1903.
The consecration stone, Eric Gill, 1903
The fittings of the church tell the story of St. Bartholomew in all its various locations, by the Royal Exchange, in Moor Lane and the S. Alban’s mission. It is a church with an usual history of survival and regeneration, often against the odds. As we look to the future we pray that we will share the same spirit and faithfulness that has lead the parish forward in new ways as in past generations.
