Dutch Church, Austin Friars

The Dutch Church, Austin Friars — Nederlandse Kerk Londen — is a Reformed church in the Broad Street Ward of the City of London, a familiar Portland-stone landmark standing on the site of the thirteenth-century Augustinian friary from which it takes its name. Founded in 1550, when Edward VI granted the friary church's nave to London's Protestant refugees, it is the oldest Dutch-language Protestant church in the world, and is known in the Netherlands as the mother church of all Dutch Reformed churches.

The medieval priory of Austin Friars — a contraction of "Augustinian Friars" — was founded around 1253 by Humphrey de Bohun, second Earl of Hereford, who died in 1275. Its great church accumulated centuries of London memory: among those buried within was Perkin Warbeck, the pretender executed on 23 November 1499 for claiming to be Richard of Shrewsbury, younger of the Princes in the Tower. The priory fell in November 1538 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The City of London tried twice, in 1539 and 1546, to buy the friary church from the Crown, without success — and then in 1550 the nave was granted instead to the community of "Germans and other strangers", Protestant refugees mainly from the Low Countries, while the rest of the great church became a storehouse, its monuments sold off for £100 and the lead stripped from its roof. The choir, tower and transepts were demolished in 1600, but the nave lived on as the first official nonconformist chapel in England.

Under the Polish reformer John a Lasco (Jan Łaski), the mostly Dutch- and French-speaking "strangers" received their royal charter on 24 July 1550, incorporated by letters patent as the "Temple of the Lord Jesus" with four pastors — two Dutch, two French-Walloon, the latter community moving by the 1580s to St Anthony's Chapel in Threadneedle Street. The congregation grew with London's Dutch community, which by 1570 numbered some 5,000 people — the largest expatriate group in a city of 100,000 — roughly half religious refugees from the Flemish Low Countries and half skilled craftsmen: brewers, tile makers, weavers, artists, printers, engravers. Martin Droeshout, engraver of the famous 1623 Shakespeare portrait, came of this emigration, and the map engravers Jodocus Hondius and Colette van den Keere were married in the church in 1587. The arrival of William of Orange a century later brought a second Dutch wave of noblemen, bankers, courtiers, merchants, architects and artists.

For 390 years the congregation worshipped in the medieval nave — until the night of 15–16 October 1940, when the Blitz destroyed it utterly, ten years short of the church's 400th anniversary. The escape of its treasures is one of the providential stories of the war: the church's rare books — Dutch Bibles, atlases, encyclopaedias — had been moved out of London for safekeeping one day before the raid. The manuscript collection and the original charter of 1550 are kept at the London Metropolitan Archives, and the library collection has been undergoing digitisation.

The present church was built between 1950 and 1954 to the design of Arthur Bailey, its foundation stone laid on 23 July 1950 by the ten-year-old Princess Irene of the Netherlands. A concrete box frame clad externally in Portland stone, it carries 1950s stained glass by the Dutch painter Max Nauta, by Hugh Ray Easton and by William Wilson, and was designated a Grade II listed building on 25 September 1998. For the 450th anniversary in 2000, Professor Keetie E. Sluyterman of the University of Utrecht published a history of the church, De Kerk in de City.

The Dutch Church remains thoroughly alive: weekly Dutch-language services, confirmation classes and group meetings continue, with outreach to London's Dutch community including ministry to the elderly. The building is home to two other UK charities, the Netherlands Benevolent Society and the Dutch Centre — Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands attended the NBS's 150th-anniversary jubilee here on 24 April 2015, the day the Dutch Centre was formally opened by the Dutch Ambassador. Since April 2014 the church has performed weddings for same-sex couples. A popular visitor attraction with detailed archives and four and three-quarter centuries of unbroken history, the Dutch Church remains the City's living link to the "strangers" who found refuge in London — and to the friary whose name it carries.