Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street — universally known as Farm Street Church — is the Catholic parish church of Mayfair in Central London, run by the Society of Jesus, with its main entrance on Farm Street and a second approach through the leafy calm of Mount Street Gardens. Sir Simon Jenkins, in England's Thousand Best Churches, calls it "Gothic Revival at its most sumptuous", and few churches in London pack so much richness into so discreet a setting.

The Jesuits began looking for a site for their London church in the 1840s and found it in the mews of a back street — Farm Street takes its name from Hay Hill Farm, which in the eighteenth century stretched from Hill Street eastward beyond Berkeley Square. In 1843 Pope Gregory XVI received a petition from English Catholics for permission to erect a Jesuit church in London, and the plans were accepted. The Superior of the English Jesuits, Fr Randal Lythgoe, originally wanted a church for nine hundred people; when that proved too expensive, it was built for 475, at a cost of £5,800 raised from multiple private benefactors. Fr Lythgoe laid the foundation stone in 1844, and because the plot was so constricted the church was orientated north–south rather than the traditional east–west. The architect was Joseph John Scoles — designer of the Church of St Francis Xavier in Liverpool and St Ignatius in Preston, and father of the architect Ignatius Scoles SJ, who designed St Wilfrid's, Preston. On 31 July 1849, the feast of the Jesuit founder St Ignatius, the church was officially opened.

Scoles built in the Decorated Gothic style, and the Farm Street front is inspired by the great façade of Beauvais Cathedral. The high altar was designed by Augustus Pugin himself, carrying an inscription requesting prayers for its benefactress, Monica Tempest, and above it glow two mosaic panels by Salviati of Venice depicting the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin. What strikes every visitor is the completeness of the decoration: as Jenkins put it, awarding the church two stars, "Not an inch of wall surface is without decoration, and this in the austere 1840s, not the colourful late-Victorian era. The right aisle carries large panels portraying the Stations of the Cross. The left aisle has side chapels and confessionals, ingeniously carved within the piers." In the west window above the gallery is excellent modern glass of 1953 by the Irish artist Evie Hone, with — again in Jenkins's words — "the richness of colour of a Burne-Jones". The church's original choir window, tarnished by London pollution, was replaced in 1912 with a new one from the John Hardman Trading Company of Birmingham; the old window was cleaned, repaired and sold to St Agnes Church in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. After damage sustained in the Second World War, the church was remodelled in 1951 by Adrian Gilbert Scott, and in 1966 it became the parish church of Mayfair, having served for its first century as a Jesuit church outside the parochial system.

Farm Street's musical tradition is among the most distinguished of any Catholic church in Britain. In the nineteenth century the choir consisted of men and boys drawn from local Catholic schools. From 1881 to 1916 the organist was John Francis Brewer — son of the architectural illustrator Henry William Brewer — appointed at just eighteen, and remembered today as the author of the 1888 thriller The Curse Upon Mitre Square, inspired by the Whitechapel Murders. After the First World War the choir came under Fr John Driscoll SJ, later succeeded by Fernand Laloux, with the Belgian Guy Weitz — a pupil of Charles-Marie Widor and Alexandre Guilmant — at the organ. Weitz's most notable student, Nicholas Danby, succeeded him as organist in 1967 and re-established the choir in the early 1970s as a fully professional ensemble; Danby also taught John Keys, Paul Hale and Robert Costin. After his death in 1997, two of his students, Martyn Parry and David Graham, became Joint Directors of Music, and following Parry's death in 2004 Duncan Aspden was appointed Associate Director of Music alongside Graham. Recordings were made through the 1990s, including a CD of organ music recorded by Graham in 2000 featuring the music of Guy Weitz, and the repertoire today ranges from sixteenth-century polyphony and Gregorian chant through the Viennese classics and nineteenth-century romantics to contemporary music.

The church has also become known for the breadth of its welcome. In March 2013 it opened its doors to LGBT Catholics after the "Soho Masses" at the nearby Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory came to an end after six years, with Archbishop Vincent Nichols attending their first Mass there in 2013 — a development commentators contrasted with the church's refusal, in 1897, to accommodate Oscar Wilde, who on his release from prison after his two-year sentence for gross indecency had petitioned Farm Street for a six-month retreat. And in a historic first, King Charles III attended a special Advent service at the church co-hosted by Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity supporting persecuted Christians — the first time a reigning monarch had done so.

The church anchors a wider Jesuit campus of learning and service. In September 2004 the Mount Street Jesuit Centre was launched to provide adult Christian formation through prayer, worship, theological education and social justice, offering non-residential retreats and spirituality courses, providing a full-time general practitioner for homeless people at the Doctor Hickey Surgery, and working with the London Jesuit Volunteers. When Heythrop College formally closed in 2019, the London Jesuit Centre was launched in the same location, incorporating a reading room of the Heythrop Library with about 8,000 books on open access and indirect access to most of the college's collection; until 2022 it taught a master's degree in theology, ecology and ethics with the University of Roehampton, linked to the Laudato Si' Research Institute at Campion Hall, Oxford, and it continues to offer teaching, spirituality courses and retreats. The Jesuits' publishing tradition continues too: The Month, the review founded in 1864 by Frances Margaret Taylor and long edited by the Jesuits, closed in 2001, and on 18 January 2008 its successor Thinking Faith was launched as a free online journal of theology, politics, philosophy, spirituality, poetry and culture, its articles syndicated by publications from America magazine to the journal of the Diocese of Parramatta. Behind its Beauvais-inspired façade in a Mayfair back street, Farm Street remains what it has been since 1849 — the spiritual, intellectual and musical heart of English Jesuit life.