Christ Church

Christ Church, Marylebone — also known as Christ Church, Lisson Grove, or Christ Church, Cosway Street — is a Grade II* listed former Church of England church in the City of Westminster, built in the 1820s to designs by Thomas and Philip Hardwick. It stands on a busy street midway between Paddington Station and Regent's Park, and after deconsecration in 1977 it passed through lives as an antiques market and restaurant before finding its present role as a sports centre: the Greenhouse Centre, opened by Princes William and Harry in 2018.

Christ Church was one of the first of the Commissioners' churches — the six hundred or so new churches built between the 1820s and 1850s by the Church Building Commission, using £1,500,000 voted by Parliament so that the growing populations of the suburbs could be better served by the Established Church. The Hardwicks' design is square Georgian neoclassicism, faced in pale limestone over a brick-built nave. A four-columned Ionic portico fronts the building beneath a blank pediment, with further pairs of pillars on each side; above rises a square tower with clock faces and Corinthian pillars, crowned by an octagonal cupola with a bell-shaped roof. Inside is an eight-bay Corinthian arcade with Corinthian pilasters on the east wall, clerestory windows above an entablature, galleries, and a low arched nave ceiling with ribs and oval panels. Like many metropolitan churches it had no graveyard, and was instead provided with a large burial vault. Sir Arthur Blomfield designed alterations to the church in 1887.

The parish of Christ Church, Cosway Street was created in 1825 by Act of Parliament, one of four new district rectories within the ancient parish of St Marylebone, provided with a rectory called Christ Church House. The first rector, George Saxby Penfold, moved on in 1828 to become first Rector of the newly built Holy Trinity, Marylebone, and was succeeded by the classical scholar Robert Walpole — grandson of Horatio Walpole and great-nephew of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole — who served until 1856. His successor John Llewelyn Davies, rector for over three decades, was also Honorary Chaplain to the Queen. Under Oswald Wardell-Yerburgh, who arrived in 1891, a new Christ Church House was built in Shroton Street in polychromatic brick, with parish rooms and a Boys' Club in the basement, formally opened by the Duke of Fife in December 1892. In 1898 the St John's Wood Chapel became a chapel of ease to Christ Church, and from 1932 the rector lived at St John's House, the parish increasingly administered from there.

The church's registers record some notable names. Constance Lloyd — later an author and the wife of Oscar Wilde — was baptised at Christ Church on 9 June 1858. The scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone married Emma West here on 12 February 1847; the writer and publisher Edward William Cox married Rosalinda Alicia Fonblanque here in 1844; John Sterling, the essayist remembered by Carlyle, married Susannah Barton here on 2 November 1830; and the military author John Percy Groves married Harriet Augusta Raines here in 1873. In 1850, aged only fifteen, Arthur Sweatman — later Archbishop of Toronto — began teaching in the Christ Church Sunday school.

The Second World War scattered the parish's institutions: by agreement with the rector Oswin Gibbs-Smith — appointed in 1941, and simultaneously in charge of St Barnabas, Bell Street and St Stephen, Avenue Road with St Andrew, Allitsen Road — the Royal Air Force took over Christ Church School in Cosway Street, Christ Church House in Shroton Street, the De Walden Institute in Charlbert Street, and the St John's Wood Chapel as accommodation for airmen. A 1945 reorganisation scheme proposed uniting Christ Church with St Barnabas, Bell Street, while the St John's Wood Chapel became a parish church in its own right; the scheme was legally implemented in 1952, Gibbs-Smith having resigned at the beginning of 1948 to become Archdeacon of London and later Dean of Winchester. In 1971 the parish was united with St Paul, Rossmore Road as "Christ Church and St Paul", with both buildings serving as parish churches — until parish reorganisation rendered Christ Church redundant, and it closed in January 1977; in July 1978 the parish was united with St Mark with St Luke, Marylebone under a team ministry.

The building's secular afterlife began in the 1980s, when it was sold and converted by Umano architects into an antiques market and restaurant. In 2014 it was bought by Greenhouse Sports, a youth charity, with the help of the former banker Michael Sherwood; the Sport England Lottery, the London Marathon Charitable Trust and the People's Postcode Lottery supported its refurbishment as a multi-sports centre, with the crypt — once the parish's burial vault — converted into changing rooms and meeting rooms. On 30 April 2018 Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry formally opened the Greenhouse Centre, and the Hardwicks' Ionic temple now rings to table tennis and basketball — a Commissioners' church still serving the young people of Marylebone, two centuries on.