Church of England Chapel Richmond Cemetery

Grove Gardens Chapel is a Victorian cemetery chapel standing in Richmond Old Cemetery, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Built in 1877 by the eminent architect Sir Arthur Blomfield as the Anglican chapel for the cemetery, it is a Grade II listed building in the Gothic Revival style, and though it has long since been deconsecrated, it survives as a handsome and historic landmark now cared for by the conservation charity Habitats & Heritage.

The ground on which the cemetery lies has a long history. Originally part of a common, it was used in the seventeenth century for Richmond's Pest House, where victims of the plague were housed, and a small portion, Pesthouse Common, still survives along Queen's Road. In 1786 George III granted the land to the Richmond Vestry for a workhouse and burial ground, and the first burials took place that year, though the cemetery was not converted to formal municipal use until 1856. As was common in the Victorian period, two chapels were provided to serve the separate needs of Anglican and Nonconformist mourners — probably at first as temporary corrugated-iron structures, until Richmond's growing population called for something more permanent. In the 1870s the Vestry commissioned two new chapels: the Anglican one, now known as Grove Gardens Chapel, was built by Sir Arthur Blomfield, while the Nonconformist chapel, by an unknown designer, survives as a private house on the cemetery's edge.

The division between the two congregations could be sharp. Canon Charles Tickell Proctor, Vicar of Richmond in the 1870s, controversially built a wall to separate the consecrated Anglican ground from the Nonconformist area, and it was removed only after the Bishop of Winchester intervened. Soon after the chapels were built the parish passed from the Diocese of Winchester to that of Rochester, and since 1905 it has belonged to the Diocese of Southwark.

The chapel was designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield (1829–1899), one of the leading church architects of the age. Born at Fulham Palace, a son of Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London, he began his practice in 1856 and became architect to the Diocese of Winchester, in which Richmond then lay. President of the Architectural Association and a Vice-President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, knighted in 1889, he worked on buildings as varied as the Bank of England and churches as far away as the Falkland Islands, and carried out several other works in the Richmond area. Built of Kentish ragstone with Bath stone detailing on a cruciform plan, Grove Gardens Chapel belongs to the High Victorian Gothic phase of the revival, its contrasting stone trim around the windows and doors reflecting the taste for polychrome decoration encouraged by the Ecclesiological Society. The entrance arch is inscribed with a truncated verse from St John's Gospel — "In the garden there was a new sepulchre, there laid they Jesus" — and once held a statue of Joseph of Arimathea by Farmer and Brindley, now lost. Inside survive a three-panelled mosaic reredos of the Annunciation and a stained-glass panel of the Ascension, both by Daniel Bell, brother of Alfred Bell of Clayton and Bell, together with a brass fireplace likely designed by Thomas Jeckyll.

The four-acre burial ground holds over a thousand graves and the records of more than two thousand people. Among those buried here are Canon Proctor himself, who helped build the chapel; William Francis, co-founder of the publishers Taylor & Francis; and Walter Hood Fitch, the celebrated botanical illustrator who worked with Sir William Hooker at Kew Gardens.

As the cemetery filled and was joined with East Sheen Cemetery in the early twentieth century, the chapel's purpose came to an end, and it was deconsecrated and closed in the 1960s. After decades of neglect it was recognised for its architectural merit and Grade II listed in 1990, then restored in the early 2000s through a National Lottery–funded project that brought it back into community use, including a period as a Steiner kindergarten. Now suffering from subsidence, the chapel is being stabilised for the future by Habitats & Heritage. A fine work of one of the great Victorian church architects, Grove Gardens Chapel remains a quiet but distinguished survival amid the trees and gravestones of Richmond Old Cemetery.