St James's Church, Clerkenwell

St James's Church, Clerkenwell, is an Anglican parish church in Clerkenwell, London — a Georgian preaching-house of 1792 standing on a site of worship for over nine centuries, whose lively history runs from a Norman nunnery through Pocahontas's family, a highwayman's grave, and disputed vicar elections, to its present life as Inspire Saint James Clerkenwell.

The parish has had a long and sometimes colourful history. The springs that give Clerkenwell its name — the clerks' well — are mentioned in the reign of Henry II, when the parish clerks of London performed their mystery plays in the neighbourhood, sometimes before royalty. Around 1100 the Norman baron Jordan Briset founded an Augustinian nunnery dedicated to St Mary, which grew wealthy and influential, keeping a place of pilgrimage at Muswell Hill — an outlying tract the parish retained into the nineteenth century. At the Dissolution under Henry VIII the nunnery church — which by then had acquired a second dedication to St James — was taken into use by the parishioners, who had long been using part of it already. The nunnery site was granted to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, in 1540, but the freehold of the church passed through various hands until 1656, when it was conveyed to trustees on behalf of the parishioners, who also obtained the right to appoint the vicar — and, unusually, kept it after the Restoration. Elections of vicars were held with all the excitement and paraphernalia of parliamentary elections right down to the early twentieth century, establishing a distinctly Low Church tradition. That tradition produced one famous quarrel: in the later eighteenth century, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon — the strong-minded evangelical noblewoman — took over Spa Fields Chapel in the parish and insisted on appointing her own chaplains; the furious vicar's action against her in the ecclesiastical courts caused her secession from the Church of England, and the founding of her Connexion's independent course.

The old church gathered famous dust. The playwright George Peele was buried here in 1596, Thomas Dekker — it is believed — in 1632, and Thomas Heywood in 1641: three of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage's great names in one churchyard. The steeple fell down twice in 1623 before being successfully rebuilt. In September 1632, Thomas Rolfe — son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe — married Elizabeth Washington here; their daughter Anne was born a year later, Elizabeth dying shortly afterward, and Rolfe returned to Jamestown, Virginia, leaving his daughter with a cousin. And in 1737, Matthew King, accomplice of Dick Turpin, was buried at St James aged twenty-five, after being allegedly accidentally shot by Turpin himself during a robbery.

By 1788 the old church — a medley of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sections grafted onto the medieval nunnery remains — presented "an appearance of picturesque and dilapidated muddle", and an Act of Parliament was passed for rebuilding, funded by the sale of annuities. The architect was a local man, James Carr, who produced a building that is pre-eminently a preaching-house but with carefully planned, harmonious detail clearly influenced by Wren and Gibbs. Bishop Beilby Porteus dedicated the new church in 1792. Upper galleries were added in 1822 for the children of the Sunday School — founded in 1807 and still flourishing — with the back parts reserved for the poor; William Pettit Griffith restored the tower and spire in 1849, and Sir Arthur Blomfield restored the church and rearranged the ground floor in 1882, both works done very well. Inside, a noteworthy feature is the curved acoustic wall at the west end; the east windows hold stained glass of 1863 by Heaton, Butler and Bayne. The organ of 1792 by George Pike England — taken in part exchange for its Richard Bridge predecessor — survives with much of its pipework and its Spanish mahogany case, the rococo carved drapery over the pipes especially fine; Noel Mander rebuilt it in 1978, returning it to original style after drastic 1928 alterations. A fine peal of eight bells of 1791 hangs in the tower, all recast in 1928. The church's most noteworthy Victorian vicar was the Reverend Robert Maguire, prolific writer of Protestant pamphlets, who arrived after a peculiarly stormy election.

The church is a museum of its own past. The original communion table — mahogany inlaid with boxwood, decorated with plumes of feathers and a dove — and communion rail survive, both curved toward the west; a wooden figure of St James that stood over the poor box in the old church now presides over the west door, beneath the Coade stone royal arms of George III, dated 1792. Monuments rescued from the old church include a wall tablet to William Wood, the noted archer (died 1691), restored by the Toxophilite Society in 1791; a large armorial tablet to Elizabeth, Countess Dowager of Exeter; and a sixteenth-century brass to John Bell, Bishop of Worcester, buried in the old church in 1556. The porch holds memorials to Bishop Gilbert Burnet of Salisbury, the historian-preacher who died in the parish in 1714 (with a floor slab under the communion table); to Henry Penton, whose grandson developed Pentonville; and to Thomas Crosse and his wife — a sculpture by Roubiliac — alongside benefaction boards recording charities still distributed among Clerkenwell's elderly, dating back to Elizabeth I's reign. Two darker memorials stand out: one to the victims of the "Fenian Conspiracy" — the 1867 Clerkenwell Prison explosion that killed twelve and injured a hundred and twenty — and a modern memorial at the blocked-up "Martyrs Door" to sixty-six martyrs of the Smithfield Fires between 1400 and 1558, commemorating the demolished Smithfield Martyrs Memorial Church of St Peter, whose parish was reunited with St James's, as was that of St John — the remnant of the priory whose church is now the chapel of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

The crypt, used for burials until three hundred coffins were moved early in the twentieth century, was excavated and opened as a hall by Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein in 1912, remodelled and reopened by Bishop Richard Chartres in 1994, with a dedicated youth space opened by Bishop John Sentamu in 1999. With its vaulted brick ceiling and parquet floor, it is a popular venue for exhibitions, film shoots, parties and wedding receptions — appearing in About A Boy (2002), Holmes & Watson (2018), Black Earth Rising, Katie Melua's "Two Bare Feet" video and the BBC's Songs of Praise. In 2018 the Bishop's Mission Order initiative "Inspire London" was combined with the parish to form Inspire Saint James Clerkenwell, under the Reverends Mark Jackson and Pete Nicholas, Jackson being licensed as incumbent in December 2022 — the parishioner-electing, playwright-burying, countess-fighting church of the clerks' well, renewed once again for its tenth century.