St Alfege Church, Greenwich

St Alfege Church stands at the centre of Greenwich, in London's Royal Borough — an Anglican church of medieval origin, rebuilt in 1712–14 to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor, on a site sanctified by martyrdom a thousand years ago. Here, reputedly, Alfege, Archbishop of Canterbury, was killed by Danish raiders on 19 April 1012; here Henry VIII was baptised; here Thomas Tallis, the father of English church music, was buried; and here General James Wolfe, the victor of Quebec, was laid to rest.

The dedication marks the spot of England's most famous eleventh-century martyrdom. Alfege — also spelt Alphege — was taken prisoner during the Danish sack of Canterbury in 1011 and carried to the raiders' camp at Greenwich, where he was killed when the enormous ransom demanded for him was not forthcoming: by tradition, pelted to death with ox bones at a drunken feast after he refused to let his people pay. A church rose on the site of his death, was rebuilt around 1290, and in 1491 saw the baptism of the infant Henry VIII, born in Greenwich Palace nearby. The patronage passed to the abbey at Ghent in the thirteenth century; after Henry V suppressed the alien priories it was granted to the priory at Sheen, remaining there until transferred to the Crown by exchange under Henry VIII in 1530. Tudor Greenwich filled the church with music: William Newark, the Renaissance choirmaster and composer, was buried here in 1509; Richard Bower, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal from 1545 to 1561, followed; and in 1585 Thomas Tallis, organist and composer to four monarchs, was buried in the chancel of the medieval church.

That medieval church met a dramatic end: during a storm in 1710 it collapsed, its foundations weakened by centuries of burials both inside and out. The disaster became an opportunity that changed English architecture. The parish's petition for rebuilding helped prompt the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, and St Alfege became the first church built by the commissioners — designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, one of the commission's two surveyors, begun in 1712, structurally complete by 1714 and consecrated in 1718. The builder was Edward Strong the Younger, friend of Christopher Wren the Younger.

The church is rectangular in plan with a flat ceiling and a small apse for a chancel. The east front toward the street carries a portico in the Tuscan order, its central arch cutting through entablature and pediment — a motif from Wren's "Great Model" for St Paul's Cathedral — while a giant order of pilasters runs around the rest of the building, a feature the historian Kerry Downes suggests may have been added by Thomas Archer, who according to the commission's minutes "improved" Hawksmoor's plans. Wide projecting vestibules rise the full height of the building on the north and south sides. Hawksmoor planned a west tower — his 1714 engraving shows an octagonal lantern of the kind he later built at St George in the East — but the commission balked at the cost, and the medieval tower, which had survived the collapse, was retained; John James refaced it and added the spire in 1730.

War nearly destroyed the church again. The crypt served as an air-raid shelter during the Second World War, and during the Blitz, on 19 March 1941, incendiary bombs set the roof ablaze; it collapsed burning into the nave, gutting much of the interior, though the walls and tower stood. Sir Albert Richardson restored the church by 1953, and as part of the post-war work the tempera artist Augustus Lunn painted stencils of Mary and St John the Evangelist flanking the Cross — a traditional rood — in the side chapel of St Alfege with St Peter.

The church's organs carry the Tallis inheritance. The previous organ dated back to the sixteenth century, when St Alfege was recorded as having "a pair of organs"; restored by Thomas Swarbrick in 1706, it passed through the hands of Dallam, George England, J. W. Walker & Sons, Robson and Flight, Lewis & Co and R. Spurden Rutt, growing to 47 stops by 1934, surviving the 1941 bombing, and reaching 55 stops in its 1953 rebuild. Its present whereabouts are unrecorded, but a three-manual drawstop console displayed at the west end of the south aisle may incorporate keys from the time of Tallis himself. The present organ, installed in 2001, came from the Lower Chapel at Eton College — an 1891 Lewis & Co instrument modified by A. Hunter & Son in 1927 and Harrison & Harrison in 1970 — joined by a small moveable six-stop organ of about 1960 by W & A Boggis of Diss, restored by Mander.

The roll of burials is remarkable. Besides Newark, Bower and Tallis lie the courtier Elizabeth Roper (died 1658); the merchant Sir John Lethieullier (died 1719) at the outer south-west corner; Henry Kelsey (died 1724), the English-born explorer of the Canadian interior; General James Wolfe, who died in victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759; the actress Lavinia Fenton (died 1760), the original Polly Peachum of The Beggar's Opera; and the MP Sir James Creed (died 1762) against the outer north wall. Most poignant is Sarah Barrett Moulton — "Pinkie" — the Jamaican-born schoolgirl whose portrait by Thomas Lawrence is among the most beloved of English paintings: she was buried in the church in 1795, aged twelve, a year after the picture was painted. John Julius Angerstein, the Lloyd's underwriter and art collector whose pictures founded the National Gallery, and a churchwarden here in the early nineteenth century, was buried in the church in 1823.

The two churchyards closed to burials in 1853 and were transferred to the Greenwich District Board of Works in 1889, when the later one was laid out as a garden and recreation ground — St Alfege Park — by the landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson, who planted five hundred trees. The church figures in literature, too: in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Bella Wilfer marries John Rokesmith at St Alfege, and in Tom McCarthy's novel C the crash-dazed Serge Carrefax recalls "liturgical chants and whispers echoing around St. Alfege's interior." Modern parish life has its own legends — in 2015 a Christian Aid cream tea in the churchyard was stormed by armed police pursuing a suspect into St Alfege Park; the vicar's wife was nearly knocked over by a machine-gun-toting officer, but, as one attendee reported, "people just carried on drinking their tea." The church also hosts the Founder's Day celebrations of Addey and Stanhope School and The John Roan School — Hawksmoor's first church, on Alfege's last ground, still at the heart of Greenwich life.