Church of St Michael and All Angels

The Church of St Michael and All Angels is a Church of England parish church beside London Fields in the London Borough of Hackney. Built between 1959 and 1961 to the designs of the prolific church architect Nugent Francis Cachemaille-Day, it replaced a Victorian predecessor destroyed in the Second World War, and is one of the most accomplished examples of post-war ecclesiastical architecture in England — admired above all for its integral programme of modern art by John Hayward. It has been a Grade II listed building since 2006.

The parish was created in the mid-nineteenth century, when the north-eastern suburbs of London were filling rapidly with new housing, a district being formally assigned in 1865 out of neighbouring parishes. The first church, completed in 1864, stood not on the present site but on Lamb Lane, some four hundred metres to the east. Designed by the Gothic Revival architect Edward Charles Hakewill in the Early English style, built of ragstone and seating around a thousand worshippers, it served the parish until 5 February 1945, when a German V-2 rocket detonated just to the south and reduced it to a partly standing ruin. For a time services were held in the vicarage and then in a mission hall, and the unsafe ruins were eventually cleared.

The present church was raised on a fresh site on the west side of London Fields between 1959 and 1961, and officially opened on 11 February 1961 by the Bishop of London. Designed for a congregation of around 430 at a cost of £42,000, it embodies the ideals of the Liturgical Movement, which sought to draw worshippers closer to the altar and into more active participation. Cachemaille-Day, a leading exponent of modernism in church building and an early experimenter with the new liturgical planning, expressed these ideals in a bold square-plan building of red engineering brick roofed by a shallow reinforced-concrete dome. Restrained and functional, with neither tower nor belfry, the church deliberately turns away from the soaring grandeur of the Victorian Gothic. Unusually, its main entrance is at the east, so that the congregation faces west towards the freestanding altar — a reversal of the traditional orientation. Concrete and steel were used both to achieve the new spatial ideals and to keep costs down in the lean years after the war.

What makes the church remarkable is its unified scheme of art by John Hayward, installed between 1961 and 1962. The visitor is greeted above the entrance by a steel-and-copper sculpture of the winged St Michael, flaming sword in hand, triumphant over the dragon-serpent of the Devil coiled beneath his feet. Inside, beneath the white-painted dome lit by spans of coloured clerestory glazing, the eye is drawn to the altar set beneath a tall hardwood baldachin, from which hangs Hayward's carved polychrome crucifix, with an Orthodox icon on the altar frontal and a figurative image of St Michael in the glass behind. The abstract clerestory windows are executed in dalle de verre — thick slabs of coloured glass set in concrete, an early British use of a technique more common in France.

Hayward's most striking contribution is a set of six large square murals on the north and south walls, depicting the Expulsion from Eden, Jacob's Ladder, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Agony in the Garden and the Empty Tomb, with angels woven through each scene to echo the church's dedication. Painted in his studio and then fixed to the walls by the marouflage technique, in the muted blues, greens and golds and the stylised figures for which Hayward's stained glass would later become famous, they were described when installed as the largest set of modern murals anywhere in the world. Further angel murals frame the altar, a Baptism of Christ stands behind the steel font near the entrance, and twelve stained-glass panels of the apostles form glazed screens to either side of the doors. The whole forms one of the most complete programmes of mid-twentieth-century church art in the country, conserved by the Wall Paintings Workshop in 2010.

In 1971 the parish was united with that of St Paul, Haggerston, whose Victorian church was then demolished, and the benefice is now formally that of St Michael and All Angels, London Fields, with St Paul's, Haggerston. Granted Grade II listing in 2006 as a bold and distinctive design of the highest quality, the Church of St Michael and All Angels remains a living parish church and a landmark of post-war faith and art on the edge of London Fields — a building where the modern movement in architecture and a singular vision of religious art were brought together as one.