St Andrew's Church

St Andrew's Church, Leytonstone, is a Victorian Church of England parish church in East London, standing beside Epping Forest in the London Borough of Waltham Forest — a Grade II listed building born as the memorial to one of Victorian England's great philanthropist-bankers, and home today to the most important collection in England of the stained glass artist Margaret Chilton.

The church stands on land that was part of the Wallwood Estate, purchased in 1817 by William Cotton, a wealthy banker who became Governor of the Bank of England in 1843 — and a leading philanthropist who, besides supporting educational charities, founded three new churches in the East End of London and made donations toward more than seventy others. Cotton died in 1866, and when his son Sir Henry Cotton sold the estate for housing development in 1874, one plot adjoining Forest Glade, part of Epping Forest, was reserved for a new church as a memorial to his father. In 1882 a temporary corrugated iron building — a "tin tabernacle" — went up on the plot as a chapel of ease to St John the Baptist's Church, provisionally called the Cotton Memorial Church, served at first by St John's clergy until William Manning was appointed first incumbent in 1885.

Work then began on a large new church to the design of Sir Arthur Blomfield, funded jointly by the Cotton family, the Bishop of St Alban's Fund and the new congregation. The foundation stone was laid on 18 June 1886 by Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, in a ceremony attended by the Lord Mayor of London and five bishops; an account of the construction by the builders Woodward and Wilson and a copy of The Times were sealed beneath the stone. The chancel, funded by the Cottons as the memorial to William, was built to the highest standards; it and the first three bays of the nave were completed and closed off with a temporary wall so that the church could open, consecrated by Thomas Legh Claughton, Bishop of St Albans, on 30 April 1887. St Andrew's became a separate ecclesiastical parish on 29 December 1887 with Manning as first vicar, and the congregation raised the £2,500 needed to complete the west end, which Bishop Claughton dedicated on Maundy Thursday, 30 March 1893. The church quickly became the most popular in the district: in 1903 it reported a total Sunday congregation of 1,519 — 723 in the morning and 796 in the evening. A church hall in the Arts and Crafts style followed in 1904, designed by Henry Charles Smart, an architect living in the parish, and a vestry in 1913.

Blomfield's building is a large essay in Early English Gothic, of Kentish ragstone with freestone dressings and knapped flint, with a slender flèche over the crossing, porches on the west and north, and a large eastern chancel. The west front carries a tall central window of paired lancets and a roundel, flanked by single lancets, with pinnacles at the corners; the east end has three lancets and two roundels, similarly pinnacled. Low aisles run either side of a long five-bay nave. Inside, the walls are lined with red brick, with stone dressings to the arcade of moulded arches on circular columns; the chancel is ashlar-faced, with carved corbels to the chancel arch, a wooden barrel-vaulted roof, and east windows of 1892, while the nave has an arched cruck roof with pierced timbers, original polished oak pews and choir stalls, and a wooden altar front painted with a lamb and angels.

The nave windows are the church's particular glory: many are the work of Margaret Chilton (1875–1963), a student of Christopher Whall, made between 1919 and 1957. The earlier windows, some of them war memorials, belong to the Arts and Crafts tradition, while her later work shows expressionist influences — and together they form the most important collection of her work in England. The pipe organ has its own pedigree, based on a much earlier instrument acquired in 1889 from St Jude's Church, Whitechapel, and fully rebuilt after a 1913 fundraising campaign by the prestigious firm of Lewis & Co; Dr H. W. Richards gave the first recital on 28 September 1914, and the Anglo-Canadian organist and composer Healey Willan is known to have played here. The organ was restored in the 1990s, and when the leather bellows needed repair in 2012, the choir and supporters staged a "sponsored hymnathon" — singing every hymn in The English Hymnal, non-stop, in thirty-one hours.

The later twentieth century tested the parish. By the late 1960s declining congregations brought the threat of redundancy, met with a scheme to make the buildings viable: the church hall was sold, and in a conversion completed in 1977 the western bays of the nave were divided from the main church by a full-height glazed wooden partition, one bay becoming a modern kitchen. The old hall, by then owned by the adjacent Leytonstone School, burned down in a suspected arson attack in September 2002, replaced by a sympathetic three-storey development of thirteen flats. The church received its Grade II listing on 27 February 2006, and in June 2007 Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited with Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities, in recognition of the church's cooperative work with the nearby Shri Nathji Sanatan Hindu Mandir on Whipps Cross Road.

Today the parish of St Andrew Leytonstone — the smallest by area in the Deanery of Waltham Forest — lies in the Archdeaconry of West Ham and the Barking Episcopal Area of the Diocese of Chelmsford. Worship is in the liberal Anglo-Catholic tradition, centred on the Sunday morning Eucharist, and the church centre hums with community life: a preschool, a senior citizens' group, art classes, a Scout group, councillors' surgeries, and study space for teenagers doing homework — the banker's memorial church still doing the philanthropic work its founder would have recognised, on the green edge of Epping Forest.