Church of St Thomas of Canterbury

St Thomas of Canterbury Church on Rylston Road in Fulham is a building of national importance in the history of the Gothic Revival, for it is the only complete church in London by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin — the architect who, more than any other, shaped the Victorian idea of what a church should look like. Designed by Pugin in 1847 and Grade II* listed by Historic England, it was the first purpose-built Roman Catholic place of worship in Fulham since the English Reformation, and it was opened in 1848 by John Henry Newman, the great convert and theologian who would be canonised a saint of the Catholic Church in 2019. Few parish churches anywhere can claim so distinguished a pair of names at their foundation.

The church owes its existence to an act of devoted remembrance. It was founded in memory of John William Bowden (1798–1844) by his widow, Elizabeth Bowden (1805–1896), and begun in 1847. The Bowdens belonged to the circle of the Oxford Movement — John William Bowden had been a close friend of Newman at Oxford — and the building of a Catholic church in their name was part of the remarkable flowering of English Catholicism that followed the Catholic Emancipation of 1829 and the conversions of the Oxford Movement. The foundation stone was laid in 1847 by Bishop Thomas Griffiths, Vicar Apostolic of the London District; when Griffiths died later that same year, the honour of opening the completed church in 1848 fell to John Henry Newman himself, recently received into the Catholic Church and not yet the cardinal and saint he would become. The church was intended above all for the many Catholic families who worked in the market gardens that then covered this part of Fulham — a practical mission church for labouring people, raised by one of the supreme artists of the age.

For St Thomas of Canterbury is, architecturally, a jewel. Pugin designed it in the Decorated English Gothic of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries — the medieval style he revered above all others and championed as the only truly Christian architecture. It is, uniquely, his only complete church in London: elsewhere in the capital his work survives in fragments and contributions, but here the whole conception is his, and it stands with its Grade II listed presbytery, its churchyard and St Thomas's primary school — the school, too, largely by Pugin — to form a complete Puginian ensemble of church, clergy house and school, exactly the integrated Catholic community he believed in. Féret, the chronicler of Fulham, described the interior in detail, dwelling on the reredoses of the two side chapels carved in Caen stone and the striking stained glass. The north-west tower and its pinnacled steeple rise to 142 feet, a landmark over the Fulham streets, facing the small cemetery that was opened beside the church in 1849.

That little walled cemetery is itself a remarkable place, for it became a resting place of architects — a fitting irony for a church by the greatest architect of his movement. Buried here is Joseph Aloysius Hansom, designer of numerous churches including Our Lady of Dolours in Chelsea, but famous to the world as the inventor of the Hansom cab, the two-wheeled carriage that became the very emblem of Victorian London, and as the founder of The Builder, the most influential architectural journal of the age. Here too lies Herbert Gribble, architect of the Brompton Oratory, and Joseph Scoles, who designed the church of the Immaculate Conception at Farm Street, the Jesuits' great London church — so that three notable Catholic architects of the nineteenth century lie in the churchyard of Pugin's only complete London church. The cemetery holds other figures of distinction: Sir Thomas Henry, Chief Magistrate of London; the politician Lord Alexander Gordon-Lennox and his wife Emily; and Elizabeth Bowden herself, the benefactress whose memorial gift built the church, buried near her daughter. Several mayors and aldermen of the Metropolitan Borough of Fulham lie here, and in 1911, 1912 and 1918 three infant great-grandchildren of Charles Dickens were buried in the cemetery. Three officers killed in the First World War rest here, and a war memorial records the names of fifty-nine parishioners who died in that conflict; the war memorial, the tombstone of Warrington Taylor and the Harwath Mausoleum are all Grade II listed in their own right.

The church stands at 60 Rylston Road, near the junction with Lillie Road, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and it remains an active Roman Catholic parish church in the Diocese of Westminster. The market gardens for whose workers it was built are long gone, swallowed by the Victorian and Edwardian streets of Fulham, but the church they prayed in still stands, its Pugin steeple rising over the rooftops. From a widow's memorial to her husband, by way of the hand of Augustus Pugin and the blessing of the future St John Henry Newman, to a churchyard where the inventor of the Hansom cab and the architects of the Brompton Oratory and Farm Street lie buried, St Thomas of Canterbury gathers an extraordinary concentration of nineteenth-century Catholic and architectural history into one Fulham parish. It is at once a living church and a monument of the Gothic Revival — the only place in London where Pugin's complete vision of a Christian church can be seen entire.