Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury

The Church of Christ the King rises over Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a vast Bath-stone vision of the thirteenth century set down among the university buildings of central London — within sight of University College London and adjoining Dr Williams's Library. It is one of the most remarkable church buildings in the capital, Grade I listed since 10 June 1954, and one of the great monuments of a now nearly vanished denomination: the Catholic Apostolic Church, whose trustees still own it.

The Catholic Apostolic Church — popularly called the "Irvingites" after the charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving — emerged in the 1830s expecting the imminent Second Coming, and built for that expectation on a magnificent scale. Their central London church was raised between 1850 and 1854 by the architect Raphael Brandon, whose scholarly books on medieval architecture (written with his brother) fed directly into the design. Early English Neo-Gothic in style and cruciform in plan, the church combines thirteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic precedents — a tangible record, as the Dictionary of National Biography notes, of the Brandons' study of England's medieval churches, though one contemporary critic grumbled at its lack of originality. The scale is cathedral-like: the five-bay nave, with full triforium and clerestory, rises to within thirteen feet of Westminster Abbey's. And like the Abbey, the church was never finished — two bays of the liturgical west end were never built, leaving the west front in plain brick, and the planned crossing tower with its 150-foot spire stopped at a base of blind arcading.

What was completed is sumptuous. Octagonal turrets with gabled niches and gableted spirelets mark every external corner; the entrance from Gordon Street passes through a gabled porch linked by cloister walk and octagonal turret to the Lady Chapel. Inside, the nave carries a timber hammerbeam roof with angels and snowflake bosses above a double-arcaded triforium, and — uniquely telling of its origins — a cathedra for the congregation's "angel", the Catholic Apostolic office roughly equivalent to a bishop. The crossing stands on roll-moulded arches and clustered columns; the gabled transepts hold two tiers of lancets beneath rose windows, the south transept's glass being the finest — Christ in Majesty amid ranks of saints, apostles and angels in the lancets, and a rose by Archibald Keightley Nicholson with a dove encircled by musician angels, cherubim and seraphim. The three-bay sanctuary is stone rib-vaulted with foliated bosses and keeps a sanctuary lamp by Augustus Pugin; beyond it lies the Lady Chapel (formerly the English Chapel) with a richly painted timber roof. A fine three-manual organ by Gray and Davison was erected in 1853 — Edmund Hart Turpin was among its first organists — and enlarged in 1903.

The church's second life began in 1963, when the dwindling Catholic Apostolic body leased it to the Diocese of London and it became the University Church of Christ the King, home of the Anglican chaplaincy to London's universities and colleges. Bishop Robert Stopford celebrated the inaugural Eucharist on 6 October 1963, with the former Bishop of London J. W. C. Wand preaching at Evensong. For three decades it served students from the surrounding halls with worship of strong musical ambition under directors Ian Hall, Alan Wilson and Simon Over, while the Crypt Café in the basement became a popular student haunt. On 6 December 1983 the church hosted the memorial service for Nikolaus Pevsner — a fitting venue for the great chronicler of England's buildings. The chaplaincy's last Sunday service came in June 1992 and its final service on Ash Wednesday 1994, after which the diocese surrendered its lease to the trustees.

Worship has nonetheless continued under new arrangements. Since September 2015 the main church has been used by Euston Church, a Church of England congregation planted under a Bishop's Mission Order from St Helen's Bishopsgate, with multiple Sunday services. The Lady Chapel at the east end serves the Anglican Forward in Faith movement, with Mass celebrated each weekday at half past twelve. Thus a building raised by a millenarian movement of the 1830s now shelters two distinct Anglican traditions — evangelical and Anglo-Catholic — beneath one of London's most splendid Gothic Revival roofs, still owned in trust by the church that built it and still waiting, in a sense, for its towers.