St James's Church

St James's Church, Paddington — also known as St James's, Sussex Gardens — is the parish church of Paddington, standing at the western end of the long tree-lined avenue of Sussex Gardens, a couple of minutes' walk north of Hyde Park. It is a church of two Victorian generations and one immortal wedding: it was here, on 29 May 1884, that Oscar Wilde married Constance Lloyd.

Until the 1840s, Paddington's parish church was little St Mary's on Paddington Green, hopelessly outgrown by the district's booming population. In 1841–43 a new church was built to take over as parish church. Its designer, John Goldicutt, planned a neo-classical building in yellow brick, inspired by his Italian travels, but he died with the work unfinished, and George Gutch completed it — keeping the yellow brick while turning the style to Gothic, a hybrid birth that set the tone for the church's layered history.

Within forty years the congregation had outgrown that building too, and the parish turned to one of the giants of the Gothic Revival: George Edmund Street, architect of the Royal Courts of Justice. Street planned an extensive rebuilding that retained part of the Goldicutt and Gutch structure while remodelling the church in a fourteenth-century Gothic style — and, most unusually, reversed the building's traditional orientation, so that the chancel faces west rather than the liturgical east. Street died on 18 December 1881 before construction began; two months later, on 11 February 1882, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein laid the foundation stone, and the work was carried out by Sir Arthur Blomfield, an associate of Street's son A. E. Street. The result is the church seen today: Street's last vision, executed posthumously.

The Wilde wedding came just two years after the rebuilding began. The twenty-nine-year-old Oscar, then the most talked-about aesthete in London, married Constance Lloyd here in a ceremony the bride's dress made famous; the marriage's later tragedy has only deepened the poignancy of the place. The event is commemorated by a circular wall plaque at the east end of the church, cut in Welsh slate by the letter-carver Tom Sargeant for the Oscar Wilde Society and unveiled on 29 May 2016, the 132nd anniversary of the wedding.

The twentieth century brought trial and renewal. St James's suffered considerable damage in the Blitz of 1940, its crypt serving as an air-raid shelter through the bombing. The repaired and renovated church was reopened in July 1958 by Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, with new stained glass by A. E. Buss of Goddard & Gibbs. The great Te Deum window at the east end is a roll-call of the parish's remarkable residents: Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin at nearby St Mary's Hospital; J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan; and Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement — together with a scene of the Blitz itself, commemorating those who died in the Battle of Britain.

The organ matches the church's pedigree. Built by William Hill & Sons and installed in 1882, it gained a fourth manual in 1908 from Hele & Co of Plymouth, and was rebuilt by Rushworth and Dreaper in 1936 and by J. W. Walker & Sons in 1972. Its organists have included Harold Darke — composer of the beloved carol setting "In the Bleak Midwinter" — and George Thalben-Ball, two of the most celebrated English church musicians of the twentieth century. St James's remains an active Church of England parish church, its Gothic nave still serving the hotels, terraces and travellers of Paddington, with Wilde's plaque drawing literary pilgrims from around the world.