St Andrew's Church, Ham, London

St Andrew's Church, Ham, is a Grade II listed Church of England church on Church Road, facing Ham Common in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Built in grey brick in 1830–31 to the designs of Edward Lapidge, the church grew with its riverside village across the Victorian and Edwardian decades: a south aisle with a rose window, designed by Raphael Brandon, was added in 1860, and a red-brick chancel by the distinguished partnership of Bodley & Garner followed in 1900–01. The carvings of the screen and choir stalls are the work of John Harper.

The church has thirty-two windows, eleven of them filled with stained glass installed between 1901 and 1948, four by the Lancaster firm of Shrigley & Hunt. The three-light west window by Hugh Ray Easton, installed in 1932, shows St Andrew in the centre flanked by scenes of baptism and confirmation. The east window of the Crucifixion was designed by Sir Ninian Comper in 1900 and erected in memory of Harry Scott of Ancrum, who had died in 1889, by his stepdaughters Violet Cavendish-Bentinck and Hyacinth Jessup — a family connection that ties this quiet church to the royal house, for Harry Warren Scott, son of Sir William Scott, 6th Baronet, of Ancrum, died at Forbes House on Ham Common, and his wife Louisa Scott was the maternal grandmother of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and great-grandmother of Elizabeth II. Both lie in the churchyard, as does Violet Hyacinth Bowes-Lyon, who died of diphtheria at Forbes House in 1893 aged eleven — daughter of Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and elder sister of the Queen Mother. Around the high altar hang eight large paintings of prophets and evangelists, and at the back of the church are funerary hatchments to Lionel Tollemache, 4th Earl of Dysart, of nearby Ham House, and his wife Countess Grace.

The memorials repay attention. A stained glass window commemorates Sir George Dance, the dramatist and theatrical manager who died in 1932, together with his son Erik, who died in a prison camp in the Second World War. At the eastern end of the south aisle is one of the most unusual memorial plaques in any English church, to Edward S. Borradaile: it carries an outline map of the part of Australia's Northern Territory where he and his companion vanished, with a cross marking 12°S 133°E, where they are thought to have died.

The churchyard reads like a gazetteer of Victorian Britain. Science is represented by Sir Richard Owen, the biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist who coined the word "dinosaur" and founded the Natural History Museum's collections in their South Kensington home, and by the geologist Wilfred Hudleston Hudleston, whose epitaph records "an eminent scientist whose work and research did much towards the advancement of geology". The Royal Navy is here in strength: Vice-Admiral Hyde Parker, who fought through the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 and as First Naval Lord from 1852 ensured that all new warships were steam-propelled; Admiral Sir Peter Richards, who became Third Sea Lord; Captain Lauchlan Bellingham Mackinnon, who wrote three books on his sea experiences; and Commander Stewart Carmac Weigall, the surveying officer after whom the Weigall Reefs off Cooktown, Queensland, are named. The Army contributes General William Eden, awarded a gold medal at the capture of Java from the Dutch in 1811, who lived on Ham Common where Martingales Close now stands; Major Robert Bartholomew Lawes, hereditary Constable of Dover Castle; Colour Sergeant Samuel Joseph Gray, who joined the Rifle Brigade at fifteen, served twenty-nine years through the Jowaki Expedition and the Afghan War of 1878–81, and ended his days a Yeoman of the Guard; and Major George Shannon Dockrell OBE, an Olympic swimmer for Great Britain in the 100 metre freestyle at the 1908 Games, who died in 1924 of lingering shrapnel wounds received in France nine years earlier. The First World War balloonist Carlos Bovill OBE lies here too, with three war dead — Irene Daisy Collett of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Ronald Oswald Dibben of the RAF Volunteer Reserve and William Samuel Hudson Palmer of the Royal Flying Corps — and Dr Frederick Carson, a Royal Army Medical Corps captain awarded the Military Cross in 1918.

The church's intellectual and philanthropic ghosts are no less varied. James Pierrepont Greaves, the mystic, educational reformer, socialist and progressive thinker who founded Alcott House — the experimental community on Ham Common named for Bronson Alcott — was buried here in 1842. John Minter Morgan, author and philanthropist, founded the National Orphan Home on Ham Common in 1849, and the Reverend Joseph Brown, vicar of Christ Church, Blackfriars, founded its predecessor for girls. The Reverend Richard Frederick Lefevre Blunt was the first Anglican Bishop of Hull since the title's abeyance in 1559. Charles Gottlieb Pfander of the Church Missionary Society is remembered by his epitaph as "a leading champion in the great controversy between Christianity and Mahommedanism". Hugh Colin Smith governed the Bank of England from 1897 to 1899; Sir Walter Henry Harris was Sheriff of the City of London; Sir Coutts Lindsay, 2nd Baronet, was an artist and watercolourist and founder of the Grosvenor Gallery; Emily Hornby of the Manor House, Ham, was a distinguished mountaineer whose travel journals were published after her death; Sarah Smith wrote beloved children's books as "Hesba Stretton"; Arthur Shadwell was a physician and author on public health and temperance; Frederick G. Rudler was twice Mayor of Westminster; Joshua Field of Latchmere House was Deputy Lieutenant for Surrey; and Charles Smyth Vereker, Commandant of the Limerick Artillery Militia and son of the 2nd Viscount Gort, wrote travel books on Algeria and a desert novel, and lies near his mother. Members of the Shafto family are buried here as well.

Today St Andrew's remains an active parish church, with a Sunday morning service, a Sunday School for children aged three to eleven, and a youth group for older children. It also hosts a distinctive international ministry: on the initiative of a German-speaking congregation established in 1979 by parents of pupils at the German School in neighbouring Petersham, Lutheran services in German have been held at St Andrew's since 1980, currently once a month on Sunday afternoons, alongside regular ecumenical services shared between the Anglican congregation and the German-speaking Catholic congregation that worships at St Thomas Aquinas, Ham. Between the green of Ham Common, the grandees of Ham House and the quiet rows of remarkable graves, St Andrew's distils two centuries of village, empire and church into one unassuming grey-brick building.