Church of St John

St John's Downshire Hill is a proprietary chapel of the Church of England in Hampstead, north London — a Grade I listed Regency gem at the corner of Downshire Hill and Keats Grove, and the only proprietary chapel remaining in the entire Diocese of London, one of just a handful left in England. Formally a chapel within the Parish of St Stephen with All Hallows, it is not to be confused with St John-at-Hampstead in Church Row, the parish church of the neighbouring parish — a distinction at the heart of the church's most famous quarrel.

The chapel was born of Regency Hampstead's building boom. The copyhold of the site was purchased from the Manor of Belsize in 1812 and passed in 1817 to a trio comprising the Christian minister James Curry, the "speculative" builder William Woods — active in development in Hampstead and elsewhere in London — and the lawyer Edward Carlisle. Curry offered to pay the building costs if appointed minister, and the dedication to St John may indicate the chapel was originally intended as a chapel of ease for the parish church of St John-at-Hampstead. The building was completed in 1823, with the first service on 26 October — though Curry had fallen ill and died soon after the opening, and Woods surrendered his interest in January 1824. The first minister was William Harness, a lifelong friend of Lord Byron, who departed in 1825 and was followed by four short-stay ministers.

Then came the controversy that made Downshire Hill infamous in ecclesiastical circles. In 1832 the copyhold was bought by John Wilcox, an admirer of George Whitefield and the son of a Gloucester publican, with a loan from a local dissenter. Wilcox established an evangelical ministry — but needed the permission of Samuel White, perpetual curate of the parish of St John, Hampstead, who had effectively inherited his curacy from his father and differed sharply from Wilcox's Calvinist doctrinal position. Wilcox made known that he would preach as a dissenter if denied permission to preach as an Anglican, ignored White's letter refusing consent, and was duly prosecuted for officiating without the incumbent's permission. The consistory court ruled for White, but local feeling sided with Wilcox: the poet John Keats, who had lived next door in what is now Keats House, had earlier called White "the Person of Hampstead quarrelling with all the world", and a petition gathered signatures from the Lord of the Manor of Belsize, Lord Galloway, and Sara Coleridge. The Church of England magazine thundered against the verdict: "a clergyman may incur every penalty for preaching, praying and administering the Sacrament, which he could incur were he guilty of adultery, drunkenness, profane swearing... the existing chapel on Downshire Hill may perish with the dry rot — may be turned into... a Ballroom, a Theatre or a Gambling House, but according to existing law, it can never be opened as a place of worship for the Church of England, until the Incumbent of the parish gives consent." The court's decision prevailed and the church closed until 1835; Wilcox remained in the area, devoting himself to the St John's Church School he had founded at his own expense on Downshire Hill, and died in December 1835.

That year a minister acceptable to Dr White was found: John Ayre, who served from 1835 to 1855, long the chapel's longest-standing minister. The copyhold became a freehold in 1862, and in 1863 St John's was proposed as the new parish church for the growing district — rejected because its 900 capacity was too small (though 1,370 had attended a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1851) and its plot too cramped to rebuild larger. Instead the new parish church of St Stephen's rose on Rosslyn Hill, with St John's minister Joshua Kirkman becoming its first vicar. The scholar Robert Baker Girdlestone, first principal of Wycliffe Hall, was minister from 1889 to 1903.

The chapel's independence was secured by an act of family piety. After financial difficulties in the First World War, the freehold was bought in 1916 by Albert Leslie Wright, son of the Reverend Henry Wright (minister 1872–1880), who leased the church back to the congregation for a nominal rent and directed in his will that his trustees "postpone the sale of the said chapel so long as there is sufficient congregation" — his choice of the Church Pastoral Aid Society as trustees ensuring the church's evangelical continuity after his death in 1938. The congregation finally purchased the freehold from Wright's trustees in 2003. Mission has run deep throughout: Henry Wright began an enduring link with the Church Missionary Society, donations to missionary societies were the largest item of annual expenditure from the earliest records (1872) until the First World War, and ministers have included Douglas Butcher (Honorary Canon of Cairo Cathedral), Douglas Paterson (later of the Ruanda Mission) and Kenneth Howell, earlier the first Bishop of Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Tom Watts was licensed as senior minister in January 2018. The chapel stands in the conservative evangelical tradition, has passed resolutions rejecting the leadership and/or ordination of women, and receives alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Ebbsfleet. As a proprietary chapel it is effectively financially independent of the Church of England, neither contributing to nor receiving from diocesan funds — its running costs, staff and building upkeep provided entirely by the congregation.

The building itself is one of Hampstead's loveliest: a Regency stuccoed, cream-painted façade with a Doric porch, portico and cupola, a double-staircased vestibule, and a clock of 1823 by John Moore and Son of Clerkenwell on the front. The five-bay nave carries galleries on three sides, and the original wooden box pews survive, moved to the sides in the renovation of 2003–04, when foundations were inserted and an undercroft constructed. There is no recessed chancel; inscribed panels and a frieze of biblical text in gold lettering reflect the preaching emphasis of evangelical Anglican churches of the period. The east window features an eagle — the symbol of St John and the gospel — and a Bevington & Sons organ of 1873, installed in 1880, stands in the west gallery. Major renovations followed appeals in 1896, 1950 (after war damage), 1973, 1982 and 2004 — the little white chapel beside Keats's house still owned, run and filled by its own people, as it has been for two hundred years.