Church of St Thomas the Martyr

The Church of St Thomas the Martyr — St Thomas' Newcastle — is one of the most prominent landmarks of central Newcastle upon Tyne, standing at the Haymarket close to both of the city's universities, the City Hall and the main shopping district. A nineteenth-century Anglican re-foundation of a medieval chapel, it carries a foundation legend like no other: it is traditionally said to have been created, as an act of private penance, by one of the assassins of Thomas Becket.

The church is dedicated to St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in 1170 by four English knights acting — so they mistakenly believed — on the orders of Henry II. Becket, who had defended the privileges of the Church against the king, was venerated as a martyr and canonised in 1173. The four murderers were instructed to atone by serving as confreres of the Knights Templar, but it is believed that one of them, Hugh de Morville, also chose to found a chapel dedicated to the saint as a personal penance — and that chapel, founded probably in the 1170s and certainly by the early thirteenth century, would eventually become the Church of St Thomas the Martyr.

De Morville — if indeed it was he, for there is no absolute proof — set his chapel at a riverside location, next to what is now the Swing Bridge but was then the only crossing of the Tyne at Newcastle, a wooden bridge. By 1248 both bridge and chapel were in the care of a Keeper, known to history only as Lawrence; that year much of the town burned, and though the chapel escaped, the bridge was badly damaged, and Lawrence was charged with raising money for its reconstruction in stone. The medieval chapel prospered modestly: in 1329 William Heron founded a chantry within it dedicated to St Anne, endowed with £4 17s a year, with a second chantry to St Mary on £4 3s 6d; the chapel had three cellars, one rented out by the chaplain William Spyn for fourteen shillings a year in 1347; a windmill below Jesmond was confirmed as its property in 1408, and Roger Thornton — Newcastle's great merchant benefactor — left it land in Whickham in his will of 1429. The bridge beside it was severely damaged by flood in 1339 and lay ruinous for much of the fourteenth century.

The chapel's fate became entwined with another ancient foundation: the Hospital of St Mary Magdalene, founded just outside Newcastle by Henry I for those afflicted with leprosy — the disease brought back by returning Crusaders — near what is now the northern end of Northumberland Street. Though a religious house, the hospital was overlooked in the Dissolution of the Monasteries and survives to this day, evolving by the early nineteenth century into a charity. James I incorporated hospital and chapel into a single institution under a Master — the first being a Mr Jennison — and the senior priest of St Thomas' is still called the Master today. In 1732 the Mayor and Corporation of Newcastle, patrons of the united foundation, beautified the chapel and made it a chapel of ease to St Nicholas' Church, seating 300. Alterations followed in 1770, and the great Tyne flood of 1771 — which swept away the medieval bridge — damaged the chapel; by 1827 it was deemed beyond saving, closed in March that year, and replaced by a new church built on the site of St Mary Magdalene's Hospital at the Haymarket.

The new church of 1827–30 was designed by John Dobson, the great architect of Georgian Newcastle, who produced an elegant Gothic-style building at a cost of £6,000 — now a Grade II* listed building. Galleries were added in 1837 and the seating replaced in 1881; in 1972 the High Altar was lowered, the chancel screen removed and the chancel extended into the nave with a nave altar. The church also has a curious place in Newcastle's evangelical history: when the beloved evangelical Master Richard Clayton died untimely in 1856 and the authorities appointed the high churchman Clement Moody in his place, a large part of the congregation departed to found a new church "for the maintenance and promulgation of sound scriptural and evangelical truth" — Jesmond Parish Church, also designed by Dobson, consecrated by 1861.

The modern St Thomas the Martyr is unique in the Church of England: it has no parish, yet is not a peculiar either, being governed by a body corporate of the senior priest and churchwardens under acts of Parliament, within the Diocese of Newcastle, the Archdeaconry of Northumberland and the Deanery of Newcastle. It was formally separated from the Hospital of St Mary Magdalene in 1978. Regarded as serving the whole city, it acts as semi-official church to Newcastle and Northumbria Universities and the City Hall, hosting a busy programme of civic and private services for the Royal British Legion, regimental associations, the Mothers' Union and many others; a university choir long sang the December carol service, and the conductor-organist Miles Cragg has presided at the organ for carols in recent years. The church has a long reputation for engagement with social justice — prominent in the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns on developing-world debt and trade justice, and selling fairly traded goods through its One World Shop.

In October 2019 St Thomas' was relaunched as the Resource Church for the Diocese of Newcastle, with a new staff team and a planting group sent from St Michael le Belfrey in York. The congregation grew rapidly, and the church now attracts large numbers of students and young adults each week — Sunday Communion services at 10.30am and 6.30pm, with a Wednesday Eucharist at 12.30pm. A major renovation completed in 2022 rebuilt the floors, created meeting rooms in the former aisles, replaced the Victorian bench seating with stackable chairs, enclosed the 1837 galleries in glass and floored over their raked seating to create additional rooms — and installed a full-immersion font in the nave, an apt symbol of the church's new life. The organ — an 1832 Elliot and Hill instrument replaced in 1902 by Vincent and Co, rebuilt by Binns, Fitton and Haley in 1931 and extensively by Harrison and Harrison in 1961, of considerable local renown in its recital heyday — is not currently playable, with a fundraising campaign under way for its repair; worship is led meanwhile by a band. Twinned with the Parish Church of St Helier in Jersey, the assassin's chapel reborn at the Haymarket now fills, eight and a half centuries on, with the young of the city Becket's penitent could never have imagined.