Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church

The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and the English Martyrs — known to all Cambridge as OLEM — rises at the junction of Hills Road and Lensfield Road in the south-east of the city, a vast Gothic Revival church of 1885–90 whose spire, at 65 metres, makes it the tallest building in Cambridge, visible for miles across the flat country. One of the largest Catholic churches in the United Kingdom, it was upgraded in 2022 from Grade II* to Grade I listing.

Its construction was an extraordinary statement of Catholic confidence in a university city where the old faith had been swept away at the Reformation. Cambridge's first post-Reformation Catholic church, St Andrew's, had opened only in 1843 and remained the city's sole chapel for Catholics for four decades. In 1865 the parish priest, Canon Thomas Quinlivan, acquired adjacent land but could not raise building funds; with the aid of the Duke of Norfolk the Lensfield estate was purchased in 1879, and the task of fundraising fell to Quinlivan's successor, Monsignor Christopher Scott. The breakthrough came on the Feast of the Assumption 1884, when Yolande Lyne-Stephens — a former ballerina of the Paris Opera and widow of Stephens Lyne-Stephens, reputedly the richest commoner in England — offered £70,000 for the building of a church on the site, the equivalent of nearly £10 million today.

Work began in 1885 to the plans of the architects Dunn and Hansom, executed by the Cambridge builders Rattee and Kett, with the foundation stone laid in June 1887. The raising of a great Roman Catholic church on so prominent a site — and its dedication honouring the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, Catholics executed under the Tudors and Stuarts — caused considerable controversy among local Anglicans and members of the University. Despite the failing health of Mrs Lyne-Stephens, the church was completed and consecrated on 8 October 1890, the first Mass attended by every Roman Catholic bishop of England and Wales except Cardinal Manning and Bishop Vaughan. Its predecessor, St Andrew's, was dismantled in 1902 and rebuilt at St Ives in Cambridgeshire as Sacred Heart Church.

The building follows a traditional cruciform plan with a polygonal apse and a central lantern tower, its foundation of Casterton stone, its plinth of Ancaster, and the body of Combe Down stone, with an interior of Bath stone, Plymouth marble and Newbiggin stone. The stained glass weaves Cambridge itself into the church's story, depicting the dedications of Cambridge colleges alongside scenes from the lives of the English martyrs — above all St John Fisher, the Cambridge chancellor beheaded by Henry VIII. The church also shelters a remarkable survivor of the Reformation it commemorates: a mid-sixteenth-century oak statue of the Virgin and Child, about half life size, said to have been discovered at Emmanuel College in 1850 and supposedly the very statue Thomas Cromwell ordered removed on 30 August 1538. The notice beneath it reads: "This ancient statue of Our Lady was formerly in the Dominican priory which occupied the site of Emmanuel College."

The parish flourished from the start, helped by Mgr Scott's pastoral work and the preaching of Fr Robert Hugh Benson, and in 1921 OLEM hosted the Bible Congress, the greatest Catholic gathering in Cambridge since the English Reformation; from 1922 to 1946 the church was used by the Cambridge Summer School of Catholic Studies. War left its mark in 1941, when a small bomb struck the sacristy in an air raid, blowing a six-foot hole in the roof and another in the wall of the Sacred Heart chapel, shattering most of the windows and collapsing part of the organ gallery; repairs, including replacement windows to the original designs, cost at least £35,000. After the Second Vatican Council the sanctuary was reordered by Gerard Goalen of Harlow, and on 7 April 1973 Charles Grant, Bishop of Northampton, consecrated the present central altar, the original high altar serving since mainly for reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. The rectory immediately south of the church, of about 1890 — Tudor style, red brick with stone dressings and a castellated slate roof — is listed at Grade II.

Music is central to OLEM's life. The organ was built in 1890 by Abbott and Smith to a specification by the composer Charles Villiers Stanford, and was renovated in 2002 by Nicholson & Co. The semi-professional Choir of Our Lady and the English Martyrs includes former university choral scholars, while the Schola Cantorum sings polyphony and Gregorian chant, almost entirely in Latin, at the weekly solemn Latin Mass. The belfry holds a ring of eight bells hung for change ringing, with a ninth for the Angelus, all cast in 1895 by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough and each inscribed to a saint — from St John Fisher on the treble to the tenor's "Maria Immaculata Regina Angelorum". That tenor, at over 31 hundredweight (1,603 kilograms), is believed to be the largest bell in Cambridgeshire, and the quarter-hour clock chimes by Potts of Leeds are based on the "Alleluia" chant of the Easter Vigil — so that the very hours of Cambridge are marked by Easter music ringing from the city's tallest spire.