Church of St Michael and All Angels

The Church of St Michael and All Angels stands at the heart of Bedford Park, in Chiswick, west London — the estate often described as the world's first garden suburb. A Grade II* listed Church of England parish church, it was designed by Richard Norman Shaw, one of the greatest English architects of the nineteenth century and the estate architect of Bedford Park, and it is a building of real originality and charm. Consecrated in 1880, it is a key monument of the Aesthetic Movement and of the Queen Anne Revival style, and the poet John Betjeman, a great lover of Victorian architecture, called it "a very lovely church and a fine example of Norman Shaw's work."

The church grew with the suburb it serves. Bedford Park was developed from the 1870s by Jonathan Carr as a planned community of artistic, comfortable homes, set among trees and gardens, and aimed at people of moderate income but cultivated tastes — those with, as the publicity put it, "aesthetic sensibilities". Carr commissioned the artist F. Hamilton Jackson to create promotional images of the new estate, including an "iconic" view of the church, drawn even before it was built, and the development was advertised with its gardens, its modern conveniences, its schools, its club, its stores, the famous Tabard Inn, and its church. The community attracted artists, writers and intellectuals — the young poet W. B. Yeats grew up here — and Bedford Park became a byword for tasteful, artistic suburban living.

St Michael's began modestly, as a temporary building on Chiswick High Road in 1876, before the present church was built at the corner of Turnham Green Terrace and Bath Road, near what is now Turnham Green Underground station. Norman Shaw, who had designed many of the estate's earliest houses in the red brick and white-painted woodwork of the British Queen Anne Revival style, chose to build the church in a similar manner — a bold and unusual decision, for the style was thought novel and not particularly ecclesiastical, and the great church architect G. E. Street was among those who doubted it. The result, as the architectural writer James Stevens Curl describes it, is "Perpendicular Gothic with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century domestic features" — a church that blends Gothic forms with the domestic, homely character of the surrounding houses, its wooden features originally painted a delicate pale green. The foundation stone was laid on 31 May 1879, and the church was consecrated on 17 April 1880.

The church was not without controversy. Its services were, from the start, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, with elaborate ceremonial, and this drew objections: a churchwarden of the older parish church of St Nicholas, Chiswick — the brewer Henry Smith of the famous Fuller, Smith & Turner brewery — wrote to the Bishop of London to complain about the "high" form of worship used at St Michael's. But the church flourished, and it was enlarged and enriched over the following decades. In 1887 Shaw's vision for an additional north aisle was carried out by the church's first churchwarden, the architect Maurice Bingham Adams, who at the same time added a church hall on the north side, its red brick harmonising with the church, along with the font and pulpit; and in 1909 Adams added the Chapel of All Souls, in a more purely Gothic style than the rest of the building. These additions completed the church much as it stands today.

St Michael and All Angels remains an active Anglican parish church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, serving the community of Bedford Park within the Diocese of London. As the spiritual centre of the world's first garden suburb, and as one of Norman Shaw's most original and admired buildings, it holds a special place in the history of English architecture and town planning, and it continues to draw admirers of Victorian art and design as well as worshippers.

The church stands in Bedford Park, Chiswick, in the London Borough of Hounslow, a conservation area celebrated as the pioneer garden suburb, with its leafy streets of red-brick Queen Anne houses, many of them designed by Norman Shaw and his followers. The Tabard Inn, with its tiles by William De Morgan, stands close by, along with Turnham Green and its common, the riverside walks and historic houses of Chiswick — including Chiswick House and Hogarth's House — and the wider attractions of west London, with the Thames, Kew Gardens and central London all within easy reach.

From the building of the world's first garden suburb in the 1870s, through Norman Shaw's bold and original church in the Queen Anne Revival style, consecrated in 1880, the controversy over its Anglo-Catholic worship, and the later enrichments by Maurice Bingham Adams, the Church of St Michael and All Angels gathers the artistry and idealism of the Aesthetic Movement into one building. A Grade II* listed church praised by Betjeman as "a very lovely church", it remains the living parish church at the heart of Bedford Park — a masterpiece of Norman Shaw and the spiritual centre of the first garden suburb.