St Chad's Church, Haggerston

St Chad's Church on Dunloe Street, Haggerston, is one of the great urban churches of London's East End — a Grade I listed masterpiece of Victorian brick Gothic by James Brooks, built to carry Anglo-Catholic worship into one of the poorest quarters of the Victorian capital, and still serving that mission today.

The church was a product of organised mid-Victorian zeal. The Shoreditch and Haggerston Church Extension Fund was started in 1862 to plant churches across a district of dense terraced housing largely untouched by the Church of England; the district of St Chad was created in 1863, a building committee first met in January 1864, construction began in 1867, and the finished church was consecrated on 4 April 1869. It rose on the north-east corner of Nichols Square, a poor residential quarter, with Brooks also designing the adjacent vicarage of about 1870, itself now listed Grade II*.

James Brooks is the architect one associates above all with the creation of a new type of urban church, designed as a spiritual fortress and focus for deprived neighbourhoods. His great brick basilicas, with their austere Early English detailing and tall clerestories rising — as one assessment memorably put it — "triumphantly above their once squalid settings", are found chiefly in the East End, at Hoxton and Shoreditch. St Chad's is a fine example of this austere, muscular red-brick Gothic, entirely fitted to its purpose of bringing the colour and ceremony of Anglo-Catholicism to Haggerston: externally severe, internally lofty and solemn, a basilica for the back streets.

Brooks designed not only the building but much of what fills it. The reredos, carved by Thomas Earp — the leading architectural sculptor of the age — and the pulpit are his, and he may have been responsible for further furnishings including the rood screen. The clerestory and rose windows are plainly glazed, letting light flood the brick interior, but the apse holds three large single-figure stained glass windows by Clayton and Bell, the eminent Victorian glass-makers: a Christ in Majesty at the centre, flanked by the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Chad, the church's seventh-century Mercian patron.

The twentieth century reshaped the parish around the church. St Mary's, Haggerston was destroyed in an air raid in 1941, and its parish was united with St Chad's in 1953. Nichols Square itself was demolished in 1963 to make way for the Fellows Court Estate, replacing the Victorian terraces with post-war blocks. In 1970 the church of St Augustine's, Yorkton Street — another foundation of the Haggerston Church Scheme, damaged by wartime bombing and subsequently demolished — closed, and its parish too was folded into St Chad's, leaving Brooks's church the sole survivor of the scheme's local trio. Among its clergy, Frank Buttle, vicar from 1937 until his death in 1953, is remembered as the founder of the children's charity that bears his name.

St Chad's remains an active Anglican parish church in the deanery of Hackney and the Diocese of London, worshipping in the Anglo-Catholic tradition under the alternative episcopal oversight of the Bishop of Fulham — a direct continuation of the churchmanship it was built to embody. The building's grandeur has come at a price: it stands on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register, its fabric needing the kind of sustained care its founders once lavished on it. Yet a century and a half after its consecration, Brooks's brick basilica still rises over Haggerston as intended — a landmark of faith amid the changing estates of the East End.