St Giles' Church, Camberwell

St Giles' Church, Camberwell, is the parish church of Camberwell in the London Borough of Southwark, and one of the earliest major Gothic Revival works of George Gilbert Scott — the architect who went on to design St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial. Its 210-foot spire still commands the south London skyline, rising from a site where Christians have worshipped for the better part of a thousand years.

The church is dedicated to St Giles, the patron saint of the disabled, and local legend ties the dedication to a well near Camberwell Grove — perhaps the very well that put the "well" in Camberwell. An article of 1827 speculated that "the well might have been famous for some medicinal virtues and might have occasioned the dedication of the church to this patron saint of cripples." The ancient parish it served was vast, stretching from Boundary Lane, just north of the present Albany Road, all the way south to Sydenham Hill.

A church stood here in Anglo-Saxon times and was recorded in the Domesday Book — almost certainly a wooden building standing amid fields and woodland. It was rebuilt in stone by William FitzRobert, Earl of Gloucester and Lord of the Manor of Camberwell, and over the following three centuries was repeatedly altered and extended, until by the eighteenth century the interior was crammed with box pews. Those pews helped seal the old church's fate. On 7 February 1841 a devastating fire, started by a faulty heating system and fed by the timber pews and galleries, virtually destroyed the medieval building; the heat was so intense that stained glass melted and stone crumbled to powder.

The competition to design a replacement attracted fifty-three entries and was won by the firm of Scott and Moffatt, making St Giles' one of the first significant Gothic buildings by the young George Gilbert Scott. The new church was consecrated on 21 November 1844 by the Bishop of Winchester, in whose diocese Camberwell then lay. Scott built it on a cruciform plan with a central tower crowned by an octagonal spire of 210 feet. Much of the facing stone was imported from Caen in Normandy — a costly mistake, for by the 1870s the soft French stone was decaying badly in London's polluted air. To his credit, Scott acknowledged the error and paid out of his own pocket for the church to be refaced in Portland stone, which has weathered the city far better.

The building is a textbook of confident early Victorian Gothic: gabled transepts, a clerestoried nave of five bays with lower aisles and gabled porches, an arch-braced roof, and a lierne vault at the crossing, with the nave arcades carried on alternating round and octagonal columns with foliated capitals. The south transept serves as the Lady Chapel and the north transept houses the organ. Remarkably, two genuine relics of the medieval church survive inside: a fourteenth-century sedilia and piscina, moved into the rebuilt church in 1916 and now set on the south side of the Lady Chapel. A medieval porch from the old church still stands in the former vicarage garden on Benhill Road — today, with magnificent bathos, housing the bins of the local youth club.

The stained glass is among the most interesting in south London. The great east window, depicting biblical scenes from the Creation to the End of Time, was designed by the polymath and art critic John Ruskin — then a resident of nearby Herne Hill — together with Edmund Oldfield, after Ruskin had toured medieval French cathedrals including Chartres for inspiration; the glass was made by Ward and Nixon, who also made the west window, which incorporates thirteenth-century glass from Trier. The chancel has angel windows by Lavers & Barraud. The William Morris windows in the south transept were destroyed by wartime bombing — the church suffered considerably in the Second World War — and were replaced in 1956 by Ninian Comper designs showing St Giles, St Nicholas, St Alphege and St Thomas Becket, with St Swithin and Bishops Lancelot Andrewes, Anthony Thorold and Edward Talbot below.

The organ is historically significant in its own right. Samuel Sebastian Wesley — one of Samuel Wesley's seven children, and later the most celebrated cathedral organist and composer of his generation — had been organist of the old St Giles' early in his career, and after the fire he returned in 1844 to design the new instrument and play its opening recital. The three-manual organ was built by James Chapman Bishop, whose firm, founded in 1807 and surviving as Bishop & Son, still maintains it today. Restored in 1890 and 1960, it retains its original mechanical tracker action, electro-pneumatically assisted since the 1960 work. In 2015 the church launched a £500,000 restoration appeal, in aid of which its Director of Music, Ashley Valentine, attempted the Guinness world record for the longest marathon church organ playing. The tower carries a ring of ten bells cast in 1844 by Mears at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, with a tenor of 24 hundredweight.

On the north side of the church, a plaque by the sculptor Eric Gill commemorates Charles Masterman (1873–1927), the Liberal politician who instigated the National Health Insurance system, the precursor of the NHS. Beneath the church lies a 300-year-old crypt: its graves and tombs were cleared in the early 1960s and the rooms refurbished for the Camberwell Samaritans, opened in their new role by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in February 1962 to provide emergency relief for the area's homeless men. That work evolved into the St Giles Trust, which continues a few minutes' walk away on Camberwell Church Street, while the crypt itself has found new life as an arts venue and jazz club. A century and a half after Scott's refacing, the spire too needed rescue: stone began falling and vertical cracks threatened its stability, so in June 2000 the top 72 feet were taken down and rebuilt at a cost of £1 million. St Giles' remains an active parish church in the Diocese of Southwark, at the heart of Camberwell life as it has been since before the Conquest.