Charles Church

Charles Church in Plymouth, Devon, is one of the most poignant landmarks of that great naval city: a roofless, ivy-clad ruin standing alone on a traffic island in the heart of the modern town, deliberately preserved as it was left by the bombs of the Second World War, as a memorial to the civilians of Plymouth who died in the Blitz. Once the second-oldest parish church in Plymouth and a centre of the city's spiritual life for three hundred years, it was gutted by fire in 1941 and never rebuilt, and today its burnt-out Gothic shell — like the ruins of Coventry Cathedral — speaks more eloquently of war and loss than any whole building could.

The church was a child of the seventeenth century and of the religious politics of its age. In 1634 the mayor and council of Plymouth resolved to petition King Charles I for permission to divide the ancient parish of Plymouth in two and to build a second church, the town having outgrown its medieval mother church of St Andrew's. Permission was granted, and the new church was dedicated to King Charles himself — Charles the Martyr, as the executed king came to be known after his beheading in 1649, a dedication shared by only a handful of English churches, all of them, like this one, born in the Royalist devotion of the mid-seventeenth century. Building began on the site, near the ruins of a medieval Carmelite friary, in 1641.

The construction was at once interrupted by war. The English Civil War broke out, and work on the church was halted the following year as the men of Plymouth were needed for the defence of the town. Plymouth, staunchly Protestant, sided firmly with Parliament against the king, and endured a long and grim siege by Royalist forces from 1643 to 1645 — so that the church dedicated to King Charles was built by a town in arms against him, a striking irony of the period. The half-built church appears on maps of the besieged city, and worship began in it even before completion: the first minister, Francis Porter, was preaching there from 1643, though the church was not finished until 1657 and not formally consecrated until 2 September 1665, after the Restoration of the monarchy had made its royal dedication safe again.

The completed church was a fine Gothic building — among the last to be built in the medieval Gothic style before the classical manner took over — with a west tower and spire, an aisled nave with north and south porches, and a chancel with vestry. The tower was finished only in 1708, at first capped with a wooden spire, and the present elegant stone spire was added in 1766, giving the church the soaring silhouette that made it a landmark across Plymouth. In the nineteenth century the vicar Septimus Addington Greaves restored the spire and tower, and Charles Church became the mother of a whole family of daughter churches — St John's, Emmanuel, St Jude's and others — as Plymouth expanded, so that for three centuries "Charles" stood at the centre of the city's religious life, the parent of younger churches and the home of a succession of notable clergy.

The end came in the Plymouth Blitz. Plymouth, as the home of the Royal Navy's Devonport Dockyard, was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain, and on the nights of 21 and 22 March 1941 German incendiary bombs entirely burned out Charles Church, leaving only the blackened stone walls, the tower and the spire standing above a gutted, roofless interior. When the war ended, a decision had to be made about the ruin — and, in a choice that echoed the one made at Coventry, it was decided not to rebuild. Plymouth had expanded, its population had moved out to new suburbs, and the city centre was being comprehensively redeveloped; the ruined church no longer had a parish around it. Instead, the shell was preserved as a permanent memorial, and in 1958, at a service conducted by the vicar J. Allen James, Charles Church was dedicated as a memorial to the 1,200 civilians of Plymouth who had died in the air raids. A few years later, the post-war replanning of the city encircled the ruin with a roundabout, so that it now stands isolated on its island amid the traffic — a strange and moving sight, the empty Gothic church marooned in the modern city, its windows open to the sky.

The preservation of the ruin was a deliberate act of remembrance, and it has become one of Plymouth's most recognisable landmarks and a focus of the city's memory of the war. The spiritual tradition of Charles Church was not lost with the building: the ministry continues through the Parish of Charles with St Matthias, one of its daughter churches, so that the name and the work of the old church live on even as its body stands a monument. St Andrew's, the ancient mother church, remains the principal church of Plymouth, but Charles holds a unique place in the city's affections as its memorial church.

From a royal foundation of the 1640s, built by a Parliamentarian town in the teeth of a Royalist siege, through three centuries as a mother church of Plymouth's spiritual life, to the fire of the Blitz and a deliberate preservation as a war memorial, Charles Church gathers the religious and wartime history of Plymouth into one ruined building. It is at once a relic of the seventeenth century and a memorial of the twentieth — a gutted Gothic shell on a city roundabout that stands, like the ruins of Coventry, as a quiet and permanent reminder of the cost of war and of the 1,200 Plymouth civilians it commemorates.