Church of St John-at-Hackney

St John at Hackney is a Grade II* listed Anglican church in the London Borough of Hackney, a vast classical building of 1792 with a capacity of around 2,000 — built to replace Hackney's medieval parish church, whose St Augustine's Tower still stands at the edge of the churchyard. Facing north toward Clapton Square, with Sutton House and Hackney Central station reachable through its churchyard gardens, it is both a thriving parish church and one of London's most celebrated music venues, having hosted Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Emeli Sandé, Robbie Williams, Griff and Interpol.

Hackney's church history begins long before the Georgian giant. A chapel may have served the small, prosperous manor of Hackney before the Norman Conquest, though no records survive before 1275, when it was a chapelry within the immense parish of Stepney. From the fourteenth century the church was dedicated to St Augustine of Hippo, until in 1660 it was rededicated to St John the Baptist, becoming commonly known as St John at Hackney. In the thirteenth century much of the surrounding land belonged to the Knights Templar; when the order was disbanded, its possessions passed to the Order of St John of Jerusalem, who had a mansion on Church Street, and at the Dissolution their lands passed to the Crown and were parcelled among Tudor nobles, including Thomas Sutton and Ralph Sadler.

Hackney's nearness to the City and the royal court made it popular with courtiers, merchants and businessmen, and private schools multiplied in the older houses. By 1789 the medieval church, crammed with galleries, held a thousand — and it was not enough, in a parish of 3,300 acres, the largest civil parish in Middlesex of those that later joined the County of London. A 1779 proposal by the surveyor Richard Jupp to enlarge the church came to nothing; by 1788 a committee concluded the parish needed seating for three thousand, and the architect William Blackburn flatly rejected rebuilding on the old site, advising £15,000 be raised to buy land. A parochial vote in April 1789 carried the scheme by 313 votes to 70, and after a parliamentary battle a compromise act empowered the trustees to buy Church Field, north-east of the old churchyard, for £875. When Blackburn died suddenly in November 1790, James Spiller — a friend of and influence from Sir John Soane — was chosen from six candidates. Hackney Church became his magnum opus. Convinced that a church for three thousand would have hopeless acoustics, he persuaded the trustees to let him reduce the capacity to two thousand — while remaining convinced the acoustics would still be poor unless the church was full. Work began in 1792 on the great stock-brick building on a Greek Cross plan; the main structure took over two years, and the church was consecrated on 15 July 1797. Monuments dating from the early sixteenth century were transferred from the medieval church, whose body was demolished in March 1798 — though its tower was left standing to hold the bells, since funds did not stretch to a new tower. The new church finally gained its own tower in 1814 and a stained glass east window in 1816. The trustee Harry Sedgwick oversaw a subscription that planted nearly two hundred elms and horse chestnuts in avenues through the churchyard — an achievement commemorated on his tomb; his only son, lost in action in the Napoleonic War, has an elaborate memorial inside.

St Augustine's Tower still stands — the oldest building in Hackney, a symbol of the borough that has adorned the masthead of the Hackney Gazette since 1864 and features in the borough's coat of arms; it received its four-faced Gillet & Brand clock on New Year's Day 1872. In 1890 the church bought the early sixteenth-century house on Homerton High Street as the St John's Church Institute — later purchased by the National Trust and now famous as Sutton House. The churchyard, closed to burials in 1859 and grown derelict, was laid out by Fanny Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association — the demolition of Henry Rowe's 1614 mortuary chapel included — and opened for public recreation in 1894; the war dead of Hackney are commemorated by a stone monolith of 1921 before the north entrance.

The burials read like a chronicle of England: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford — Elizabethan courtier, poet and playwright, and the favourite candidate of Shakespeare-authorship theorists — was buried here in 1604; Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland, the alleged former betrothed of Anne Boleyn, in 1537; Christopher Urswick, Rector of Hackney and Dean of Windsor, confidant of Henry VII, in 1522; Sir Francis Beaufort, creator of the Beaufort scale; the explorer Sir Edward Michelborne; the botanist Joachim Conrad Loddiges; Bishops David Dolben of Bangor and Timothy Hall of Oxford; William Nash VC; Sir Henry Rowe, Lord Mayor of London; Lady Lucy Somerset, Baroness Latimer; and John James Watson, Rector and Archdeacon, of the Hackney Phalanx.

The church has burned and risen more than once. Renovated and electrified in 1902, it had to close temporarily in the 1920s when the roof became unstable, the timbers shored with scaffolding until reconstruction in 1929. Then on 18 May 1955, with further repairs scheduled, a fire started in the roof among workmen's tools, destroying the roof, some pews and the 1799 organ by George Pike England. The major reconstruction that followed brought a replacement three-manual Mander organ from All Saints, Ennismore Gardens; altar hangings designed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey; a new east window by Christopher Webb; and the Hurdman Hall partitioned at the south end. The church was reconsecrated on St John's Day, 24 June 1958, and the fiftieth anniversary was marked by a rededication in 2008, the year the gardens won Green Flag and Green Flag Heritage status.

The most recent transformation began in 2018: a multi-million-pound restoration reconfiguring the church closer to its original Greek Cross plan and architectural language, fitting it for both worship and public concerts, with two new transept chapels, a raised performance stage, theatrical lighting and backstage facilities. Funded in part by a £1.84 million National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, the project team included the minimalist designer John Pawson CBE and the set designer Es Devlin OBE; new community facilities opened in the adjacent Hackney Gardens in 2019, and the main church reopened in September 2020 — winning an RIBA National Award in 2022. Under the Reverend Al Gordon, Rector of Hackney since 2016, the church has embraced the charismatic evangelical tradition, and Spiller's great brick cross now fills — as its architect always hoped — with thousands, for worship and for music alike.