Church of St Cyril of Turau and All the Patron Saints of the Belarusian People

The Church of St Cyril of Turau and All the Patron Saints of the Belarusian People — in Belarusian, Carkva Śviatoha Kiryły Turaŭskaha i ŭsich śviatych zastupnikaŭ biełaruskaha narodu, and widely known as the Belarusian Memorial Chapel — is a small wooden church in Woodside Park, north London, that collects superlatives out of all proportion to its size. It is the first wooden church built in London since the Great Fire of 1666; the first purpose-built Eastern Catholic church in London; the first memorial to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster erected anywhere in Western Europe; the first Belarusian Uniate church built outside Belarus; and the first church building in London made principally of cross-laminated timber panels.

The chapel is the flowering of a long exile. The Belarusian Catholic mission has existed in London since 1947, led by exiled priests Ceslaus Sipovich, Leo Haroshka and later Alexander Nadson — clergy who kept the Belarusian Greek Catholic tradition alive abroad through the decades when it was suppressed at home. The mission is historically bound to the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum, the great centre of Belarusian culture in the West, for which it served as the initial base; the church now stands beside the library and the Marian House, the Belarusian community centre in north London. For its first seven decades, the mission worshipped only in an in-house chapel — never a separate church — until construction finally began in November 2015. The foundation was completed in January 2016, and on 7 February 2016 the cornerstone — brought from the Holy Trinity Church in Druja, in Belarus itself — was laid in a ceremony presided over by the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Mennini, and Bishop Hlib Lonchyna of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of the Holy Family of London. The church was consecrated on 17 December 2016.

The design, by Tszwai So of Spheron Architects, was primarily inspired by the rural wooden churches of Belarus, with a materials palette restricted to wood and glass. The building is clad in timber, with only restricted areas of clerestory windows and obscured glazing — essentially "windowless," reflecting the inward-focused Byzantine liturgical tradition — and the external walls take their vertical timber cladding from the Baroque Uniate churches of Belarus. The little building struck a chord far beyond the Belarusian community: it was featured at the 2017 London Festival of Architecture, won the RIBA London Regional Award 2017 from the Royal Institute of British Architects, and was named People's Choice at the New London Awards 2017. The Royal Academy of Arts chose it as one of ten buildings to see at Open House London 2017; Architizer named it one of ten "Catholic Churches Designed to Uplift and Inspire"; ArchDaily placed it among the thirty-two best chapels it had ever published; and it was nominated for the EU Prize in Contemporary Architecture — the Mies van der Rohe Award 2019, the highest accolade in European architecture.

Inside, the iconostasis and altar area hold a remarkable inheritance: icons painted in 1926 by the Russian Catholic convert Duchess Olga Bennigsen and Eric Ward — presumably a descendant of the theologian William George Ward — for an Eastern Liturgical Week at Westminster Cathedral, together with several icons from the former iconostasis of the Belarusian Catholic church of Christ the Redeemer in Chicago, now closed: the worship of two scattered diasporas gathered into one new home. On 13 May 2017 the ashes of Vera Rich, the English poet and celebrated translator of Belarusian literature, were buried in the church — a fitting rest for the woman who carried Belarus's voice into English.

The chapel's deepest purpose is memory. Conceived as a memorial to the victims of Chernobyl — the catastrophe whose fallout struck Belarus harder than any other nation — it stands as both a national shrine for Belarusians in Britain and a quiet architectural landmark for London: a timber church from the Belarusian countryside, rebuilt in memory and exile at the end of a suburban street in Woodside Park, the first of its kind in three and a half centuries of the city's history.