Church of St John the Evangelist, Edinburgh

The Church of St John the Evangelist — St John's, Edinburgh — is a Scottish Episcopal church at the west end of Princes Street, at its junction with Lothian Road, in the very centre of Edinburgh. A category A listed building beneath the Castle rock, it carries one of the loveliest ceilings in Scotland, a graveyard dense with the makers of Enlightenment Edinburgh — and a modern place in history as the church where the first same-sex marriage inside an Anglican church in the British Isles was solemnised.

The congregation began in 1792, when Daniel Sandford came to Edinburgh to minister on Church of England lines. In 1797 the Qualified congregation moved to Charlotte Chapel, rebuilt on larger lines in 1811, and shares were sold to fund a new church — the banker Sir William Forbes being the main figure — with Charlotte Chapel then sold to the Baptists. Construction began in 1816 to the design of William Burn, then only twenty-five years old, and the church was dedicated as St John's Chapel on Maundy Thursday 1818. Its glory is within: a plaster pendant fan-vault ceiling derived from the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, floating Tudor splendour above the Princes Street crowds. The stained glass is largely by Ballantine, though the east window is by William Raphael Eginton.

The church grew with its century. Edward Bannerman Ramsay — the beloved "Dean Ramsay", author of Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character — joined as curate in 1827, succeeded Bishop Sandford as minister in 1830, and served until his death in 1872, Dean of Edinburgh from 1846; his memorial, a tall granite Celtic cross of 1878 by Robert Rowand Anderson with bronze reliefs by Skidmore, faces Princes Street just east of the church. The sanctuary and chancel were built in 1879–82 by Peddie & Kinnear; the vestry and hall followed in 1915–16 by John More Dick Peddie and Forbes Smith; the war memorial of 1919 was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, who also designed the faux-vaults added when Lothian Road was widened in 1926. Walker Todd furnished the morning chapel in 1935, and an extension was added at the south-east corner in 2018.

The memorials inside include General Sir John Campbell, 2nd Baronet of New Brunswick; Sir Henry Raeburn, Scotland's great portraitist; and — startlingly — John Stuart Stuart-Forbes of the 7th United States Cavalry, killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn: "Born at Rugby 28th May 1849. Killed in Action 25th June 1876", his plaque on the left as you enter, an Edinburgh family's son fallen with Custer. The graveyard is one of Edinburgh's richest: here lie Anne Rutherford, mother of Sir Walter Scott, and her brother Daniel Rutherford, the discoverer of nitrogen; Sir William Hamilton the metaphysician; James Syme the surgeon; the physicist Peter Guthrie Tait; Catherine Sinclair the author; Lesley Baillie, the "Bonnie Lesley" of Robert Burns's poem; George Joseph Bell the legal author; Macvey Napier, editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica; the historian William Forbes Skene, buried under the chapel with his father James; James Donaldson, founder of Donaldson's School for the Deaf; the civil engineer James Walker; Bishop James Walker; Daniel Fox Sandford, Bishop of Tasmania and son of the founder; Anne, sister of Stamford Raffles; and Malvina Wells (1804–1887), the only known person buried in Edinburgh who was born enslaved — a roll-call spanning the Enlightenment, the Empire and its conscience.

St John's holds daily services and is one of the few remaining Episcopal churches in Scotland to keep the weekly service of Matins. Its rectors have run from Daniel Sandford (1804–1830) through Dean Ramsay's forty-two years, Neville Chamberlain (1982–1997), John Armes (1998–2012) — later Bishop of Edinburgh — and Markus Dünzkofer (2013–2024) to David Bagnall, appointed in 2025. The church is one of three forming "Together", an ecumenical grouping in the New Town with St Andrew's & St George's West and St Cuthbert's, and each August it hosts the Just Festival — formerly the Festival of Spirituality and Peace — alongside the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; St Kentigern's Church on the Union Canal began as a mission from St John's. The church has its surprises: an Ethiopian tabot — a replica of Moses' Tablets of the Law — was discovered in storage at St John's and returned to Addis Ababa in February 2002, an early act in the modern movement of sacred restitution.

And in September 2017, after the Scottish Episcopal Church changed its marriage canon to allow clergy, with their congregations' consent, to opt into Scotland's same-sex marriage legislation, the first marriage of a same-gender couple inside an Anglican church anywhere in the British Isles was solemnised at St John's, the rector presiding — the church of Raeburn and Dean Ramsay once again at the front of its tradition, beneath Burn's fan vaults at the busiest corner in Scotland.