Church of St Thomas the Apostle

St Thomas the Apostle is a Church of England church on Boston Road in Hanwell, in the London Borough of Ealing — a building of the 1930s that ranks among the finest modern churches in the capital. Designed by Sir Edward Maufe, the architect of Guildford Cathedral, and carved with a celebrated Calvary by Eric Gill, it is a Grade II* listed building that seats 428 and belongs to the Diocese of London. Plain and modern in form yet filled with the spatial drama usually found only in great medieval cathedrals, St Thomas's is both a quietly radical experiment in reinforced concrete and a jewel of inter-war ecclesiastical art.

The church was the product of Hanwell's growth. A small village until the arrival of the Great Western Railway in the 1850s, Hanwell expanded slowly at first, much of its new housing rising where the Uxbridge Road crossed the old parish of St Mary. The pace quickened in the new century: a new tramline opened in 1906 along the Boston Road from Hanwell to Brentford, encouraging settlement in the more southern part of the district, and as the population grew the southernmost stretch of the old St Mary's parish needed a church of its own. Until then St Thomas's had been an "iron mission church" — a prefabricated tin tabernacle seating perhaps three hundred. Money for a permanent church was raised by selling off the site of an earlier St Thomas's in Orchard Street, just off Portman Square in central London, and the foundation stone of the new parish church of St Thomas the Apostle was laid on 8 July 1933. It opened the following year.

The architect was Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe, whose masterpiece, Guildford Cathedral, was then still a design on the drawing board — and St Thomas's, in an important sense, was its proving ground. The building is set on a north-east axis, with a tall square bell tower capped in green copper standing astride the northern wall, and its exterior is executed in simple lines of brown-silver-grey engineering bricks, reputed to have come from Tondu in Wales. The great external feature is a carving of the Calvary by Eric Gill, the foremost letter-cutter and sculptor of his generation, set on the north-east face and incorporating the east window; working from a scaffolding platform, Gill carved it in situ from a single block of limestone. A carved keystone in the arch of the north-east entrance is the work of Vernon Hill.

In deliberate contrast to the straight lines of the exterior, the interior soars. Plain curvilinear Gothic piers draw the eye upward to a high fan-vaulted ceiling, and by placing the bell tower to one side rather than over the crossing, Maufe was able to keep the ceiling a single unbroken plane, greatly increasing the sense of spaciousness. Those vaults are formed of reinforced concrete — still a relatively novel building technique in the early 1930s — and St Thomas's served, in effect, as a test of the method before Maufe committed to it on the far grander scale of Guildford Cathedral; he developed the technique further still in his rebuilding of St Mary's Church at Hampden Park, Eastbourne, in 1952–54. The church is thus a key building in the story of twentieth-century English architecture, a small parish church where a cathedral's structural ideas were first tried out.

The fittings are of a piece with the architecture. At the west end of the nave stands a straight-sided octagonal stone font, also by Vernon Hill, carved at its centre with a symbolic fish entwined around an anchored cross, the Koine Greek acronym ΙΧΘΥΣ — "fish", the early Christian monogram for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour — running vertically down its side. High in the west window the glass is shaped so that the lead cames form the Labarum, the Chi-Rho monogram of Christ. The aisles are defined by pointed archways in each pier, and standing at the west end and looking down either aisle, the visitor passes through deepening bands of shadow that make the two windows at the eastern end appear to shine like bright stars, though they admit only ordinary daylight — a piece of deliberate spatial theatre. The main windows are all lancets of clear, handmade leaded glass: Maufe's refusal to use mass-produced glass shows the lingering influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. The result, as critics have noted, gives the building a richness of light, shadow and changing vista normally found only in large ancient cathedrals, while its plain forms and Art Deco fittings keep it thoroughly modern.

A unifying motif runs through the whole design: the emblem of St Thomas the Apostle, a fan of three spears with a builder's square — the spears recalling the saint's martyrdom and the square his traditional role as patron of builders and architects, fitting for a church so concerned with construction. The motif recurs in the lancet windows, in the leaded oval clerestory window above the porch, in the iron gates on either side of the east wall, and even in the cast-iron rainheads on the exterior, so that the saint's sign is woven into the fabric from the gutters to the glass.

The parish has a notable place in the recent history of Anglican churchmanship. Within the Willesden Episcopal Area of the Diocese of London, St Thomas's was for years a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parish: from 1995 to 2011, having passed resolutions rejecting the ordination of women as priests, it received alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Fulham, one of the "flying bishops" who ministered to such parishes. In 2011 it rescinded those resolutions, and the parish now receives oversight from the local area bishop and welcomes women priests — a small but telling marker of the wider journey of the Church of England.

From an iron mission church on a growing tram route, by way of bricks from Wales and a London site sold to pay for it, to a Grade II* listed modern masterpiece carved by Eric Gill and vaulted in the concrete that would later roof Guildford Cathedral, St Thomas the Apostle is far more than a suburban parish church. It is one of the most important inter-war churches in London, a building where Edward Maufe rehearsed the ideas of a cathedral on a parish scale — and it remains a living Church of England church serving the people of Hanwell, its starry aisles and Gill Calvary as striking now as when they were new.