Church of St John the Divine

St John the Divine stands on Kew Road in Richmond, near Richmond railway station, a Grade II listed church of the Early Gothic Revival in the Anglican Diocese of Southwark. Built between 1831 and 1836, it owes its existence to Richmond's transformation from royal retreat to thriving Thames-side town: the place grew so rapidly through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that by the 1820s its original parish church, St Mary Magdalene, could no longer hold its congregation. The vestry resolved on a new chapel, commissioning construction by 1831 on a site provided by the local resident and landowner William Selwyn (1775–1855), and the completed church opened in 1836. Two years later, in 1838, St John the Divine became a parish church in its own right.

The architect was Lewis Vulliamy, and his design has divided opinion ever since. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, in their survey of London's buildings, memorably grumbled at Vulliamy's "craziest W spire and senseless flying buttresses from the W porches up to the nave" — though they had warmer words for the east end added in the early twentieth century by Arthur Grove, which they judged "a fine composition". Grove's work of 1904–05 gave the church its chancel, south chapel and vestries, and ushered in a remarkable flowering of ecclesiastical art. In 1908 Nathaniel Westlake painted the sanctuary ceiling with scenes from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation — fitting imagery for a church dedicated to the Revelation's author — and created the triptych behind the altar, whose stonework, along with the carving over the sacristy door, was executed by Eric Gill. Westlake also painted a set of Stations of the Cross, now lost; between 1955 and 1970 they were replaced by reliefs in Nabresina stone carved by Freda Skinner. On the east end facing St John's Road is a Calvary sculpture by Richard Garbe.

The organ, built by Beale and Thynne and dedicated in December 1896, has been described as "a virtually unaltered work of Victorian artistry" and has been fully restored. A brick church hall followed in 1911, and in 1980–81 the building was adapted by the architects Dry Hastwell Butlin Bicknell — the partnership of David Dry, Vince Hastwell, George Butlin and Roger Bicknell — to allow occasional concert use and to provide a meeting room, toilets and residential accommodation. In the early twenty-first century the reredos in the Lady Chapel was restored by Howell and Bellion.

Among the church's clergy, the most distinguished was Vigo Auguste Demant (1893–1983), vicar from 1933 to 1942, who went on to become a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral and an Oxford University professor. A regular broadcaster on the BBC's Third Programme in the 1950s, Demant served on the committee that produced the 1957 Wolfenden report, which recommended that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence" — one of the landmark documents of twentieth-century social reform.

Since 1996 St John the Divine has been part of the Richmond Team Ministry, together with the mother church of St Mary Magdalene and St Matthias. Its style of worship is modern liberal Catholic, with the Eucharist celebrated on Sunday mornings and Tuesday evenings — a living parish behind Vulliamy's much-debated spire.