St Anne's Church, Kew

St Anne's Church stands at the centre of Kew Green, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, just outside the gates of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A handsome neo-classical church dating from 1714 and listed Grade II*, it is the focal point of one of the most attractive village greens in London, and it carries a wealth of royal and artistic associations: founded on royal land by Queen Anne, enlarged at the expense of King George III, and surrounded by a raised churchyard that holds the graves of two of the most celebrated painters of Georgian England, Thomas Gainsborough and Johan Zoffany. Few parish churches of its modest size can claim so distinguished a history.

The church owes its existence to Queen Anne. It was founded in 1714 as a chapel within the parish of Kingston, on ancient royal manorial land that the queen — after whom it is named — dedicated for the purpose, to serve the growing settlement of Kew. Kew was becoming a fashionable place, attracting prosperous London merchants under royal patronage, and above all it was becoming a royal village: the Hanoverian kings and their families lived at Kew Palace and the White House, laid out the famous gardens, and worshipped at St Anne's, so that the little chapel on the green enjoyed the favour of the Crown for generations.

That royal favour shaped the building. As the population grew the chapel was repeatedly enlarged, and in 1770 King George III himself undertook to pay for its first extension, designed by Joshua Kirby — the king's "Clerk of the Works" and drawing master, a friend of Gainsborough, who was buried in the churchyard four years later. The church became a parish in its own right in 1850, and further enlargements followed: a mausoleum designed by the architect Benjamin Ferrey was added in 1851, and a grand eastern extension, including a dome, was built in 1882–84 to the design of Henry Stock, giving the church its distinctive domed silhouette. Yet more extensions came in 1902, 1979 and 1988, so that the building grew organically over more than two and a half centuries, each age adding to the work of the last while preserving the dignified neo-classical character of the original.

It is the churchyard, raised above the green on three sides of the church, that draws many visitors, for it is the resting place of two great painters. Thomas Gainsborough, one of the supreme portrait and landscape painters of the eighteenth century — the rival of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the painter of The Blue Boy — was buried here in 1788, and his table tomb is listed Grade II* in its own right. Beside the church lies also Johan Zoffany, the German-born painter who became one of the most fashionable artists of Georgian London, celebrated for his theatrical "conversation pieces" and his royal portraits; his tomb, too, is a Grade II* listed monument. To have the graves of two such painters in one small London churchyard is a remarkable concentration of artistic history, a reflection of the cultured, royal-favoured community that Kew became in the eighteenth century.

The artistic associations did not end with the Georgians. The French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who visited England several times, stayed at 10 Kew Green in 1892 and painted the church in his canvas Church at Kew — so that St Anne's appears in the work of one of the founders of Impressionism, its plain Georgian form caught in the soft light of the Thames-side village. The church's place in art history thus runs from Gainsborough's grave to Pissarro's canvas.

St Anne's remains a living and lively parish church. Its Sunday worship includes a traditional Said Eucharist, a Sung Eucharist and, on the first Sunday of the month, Choral Evensong, and its nineteenth-century pipe organ makes it a popular venue for concerts, including those of the local orchestra, the Kew Sinfonia. The church continues to stand at the heart of the community life of Kew, its green a place of cricket and gatherings, its doors open to the many visitors who come to the village and the gardens.

The setting is one of the most delightful in London. Kew Green, with its cricket pitch and its Georgian houses, lies between the River Thames and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — the world-famous gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, whose Palm House, Temperate House and Pagoda draw visitors from across the world, and which began as the royal gardens of the Hanoverian court that worshipped at St Anne's. Kew Palace, the smallest of the royal palaces, stands within the gardens, and the river runs past the green towards Richmond.

From a chapel founded by Queen Anne on royal land in 1714, enlarged by George III, domed and extended by the Victorians, and surrounded by the graves of Gainsborough and Zoffany, St Anne's Church gathers the royal and artistic history of Georgian Kew into one building on its village green. It remains the living Anglican parish church of Kew in the Diocese of Southwark — a Grade II* listed neo-classical church beside the world's most famous botanic gardens, and a quiet monument to the painters, kings and gardeners who made Kew what it is.