All Saints, Margaret Street

All Saints, Margaret Street, is an Anglo-Catholic church tucked into a dense block of Fitzrovia in Westminster, a few minutes north of Oxford Circus, and one of the most important buildings in England. Hailed as the masterpiece of its architect William Butterfield and the pioneering work of the High Victorian Gothic that dominated British architecture from about 1850 to 1870, it has been called by Simon Jenkins "architecturally England's most celebrated Victorian church", and the architectural historian Simon Thurley listed it among the ten most important buildings in the country. Behind its banded brick walls lies an interior so densely decorated that Pevsner wrote, "No part of the walls is left undecorated. From everywhere the praise of the Lord is drummed into you."

The church began humbly as Margaret Street Chapel, built in 1752 and leased in 1754 to William Cudworth, a former Methodist turned antinomian, with a nonconformist congregation in place by 1757. In 1776 the deist David Williams rented it to promote a "universalist liturgy"; closed in the 1780s, it reopened as a proprietary chapel of the Church of England under Crown ownership, by all accounts an architecturally insignificant building resembling a Dissenters' meeting house. Damaged in the Titchfield Street fire of 1825, the chapel was purchased in 1827 by the banker and politician Henry Drummond, who hoped to promote Irvingism within the Church of England and appointed William Dodsworth minister in 1829.

It was Dodsworth who set the chapel on its path into history, becoming an early follower of the Oxford Movement, the great revival of Catholic thought and practice in the Church of England led by Newman, Froude, Keble and Pusey through the Tracts for the Times. The chapel drew London's Tractarian supporters, and after Dodsworth left in 1837 and his successor Charles Thornton, a cousin of Pusey, died in 1839, the decisive figure arrived: Frederick Oakeley, a fellow of Balliol, became minister on 5 July 1839 and made the modest chapel a showcase of the liturgical practices of the Oxford Movement. It was for this congregation in 1841 that Oakeley translated the Latin hymn "Adeste Fideles" into English, a translation that, in its developed form, the world sings as "O Come, All Ye Faithful". In 1845 Oakeley asserted to Bishop Blomfield of London his right to hold all Roman doctrine, gave up his licence under pressure on 3 June, and joined the Roman Catholic Church that October, succeeded by his assistant William Upton Richards.

Oakeley had dreamed of rebuilding the chapel in a proper ecclesiastical style and raised some £3,000; Upton Richards carried the project forward, and in 1845 it fused with the ambitions of the Cambridge Camden Society, the learned society of Gothic architecture which sought to build a model church embodying its architectural ideals and orthodox liturgy together. Alexander Beresford Hope, the society's leader, took sole charge of the scheme, and William Butterfield was selected as architect. The old chapel heard its last sermon from Charles Marriott on 7 April 1850, Pusey himself laid the foundation stone on All Saints' Day 1850, and the church, with site and endowments costing around £70,000, was consecrated by Bishop Archibald Campbell Tait on 28 May 1859. The Movement also bore fruit across the street: Upton Richards encouraged Harriet Brownlow Byron into the religious life, received her profession with two other women in May 1856, and that August they founded the Society of All Saints Sisters of the Poor, one of the revived religious orders for women in England, with Byron installed as Superior by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Christina Rossetti's sister Maria joined as an associate, and Christina herself worked at the society's House of Charity in Highgate in the 1860s; the scholar Elizabeth Ludlow has argued that her poem "Yet a Little While" echoes the interior of All Saints.

That interior, and the building that contains it, changed English architecture. Earlier Gothic Revival had copied medieval buildings; Butterfield, in John Betjeman's phrase, went on from where the Middle Ages left off. Against the grey Kentish ragstone of the 1840s he built in brick, feeling a mission to "give dignity to brick" and choosing brick of such quality that it cost more than stone: red brick heavily banded and patterned with black, with bands of stone and carved elements, making All Saints the first example of structural polychromy in London, its decoration built into its very walls. John Ruskin wrote after seeing it: "Having done this, we may do anything... I believe it to be possible for us, not only to equal, but far to surpass, in some respects, any Gothic yet seen in Northern countries." Inside, every surface is patterned: diapered tile floors, walls of geometrical brick, tile and marble, great friezes of painted tiles, a painted ceiling, gilded timberwork. The chancel's gilded paintings within a carved Gothic screen are the work of Ninian Comper, restoring earlier work by William Dyce, and Comper decorated the Lady Chapel; the north wall carries the vast ceramic frieze designed by Butterfield, painted by Alexander Gibbs and fired by Henry Poole and Sons, depicting Old Testament scenes around a central Nativity with the early Church Fathers, completed in the 1870s in memory of Upton Richards. Hemmed in by buildings, the church has few windows, but the west window of 1877 by Gibbs follows the Tree of Jesse window at Wells Cathedral, the clerestory glass of 1853 is by Michael O'Connor, and the baptistery ceiling bears in marble tiling the Pelican in her Piety, symbol of fall and redemption.

The succession of vicars reads like a history of Anglo-Catholicism. Upton Richards served until his death in 1873, founding a choir school in 1860; Berdmore Compton welcomed Archbishop Benson to preach in 1886; William Whitworth ran a Pentonville mission and Welsh services; during the Victorian age Princess Alexandra worshipped here regularly until the death of her son Prince Albert Victor in 1892, sometimes bringing her husband, the future Edward VII. Henry Mackay, vicar from 1908 to 1934, raised the liturgy to its full Anglo-Catholic stature, introducing incense in 1908 and paschal candles in 1912, renaming the services "Mass" in 1911 and the Solemn Eucharist "High Mass" in 1913, the clergy addressed as "Fathers" from 1915. The Benedictine monk Dom Bernard Clements followed, celebrating the centenary of Oakeley's licensing in 1939 with the Archbishop of Canterbury preaching at evensong. Later vicars include Michael Marshall, founder of the Institute of Christian Studies opened by Archbishop Michael Ramsey in 1973, and David Hope, who marked the Oxford Movement's 150th anniversary in 1983 with Ramsey preaching, restored the Feast of the Assumption, and went on to be Bishop of Wakefield and Archbishop of York. As a parish that does not affirm the ordination of women to the priesthood or episcopate, All Saints has been under the episcopal oversight of the Bishop of Fulham since 2020; the current vicar is Peter Anthony.

Music has been central since Richard Redhead became organist of the chapel in 1839. The choir school, whose first chorister was admitted in 1848, sang at the coronations of Edward VII in 1902 and George V in 1911, and counted Laurence Olivier among its alumni before closing in 1968, when sopranos replaced the boys. William Stevenson Hoyte presided at the organ from 1868 to 1907, his student the composer Healey Willan often playing for evensong; the musical director Walter Vale arranged Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, and in 1924 Rachmaninoff himself came to the church to hear it. The organ, built by Harrison and Harrison in 1910-11, converted to electro-pneumatic action in 1957 and restored in 2002, still leads a musical tradition as rich as the polychrome walls around it, in the church where the Oxford Movement found its perfect architectural voice.