St James’s Church, Piccadilly

St James's Church, Piccadilly, also known as St James's Church, Westminster, and St James-in-the-Fields, is an Anglican church in the heart of London's West End, designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren and standing today as one of the capital's most distinctive sacred spaces: a Wren masterpiece adorned by Grinling Gibbons, the baptismal church of William Blake and of the African abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano, and home to a famously progressive Christian community that prefers to be called exactly that, a community rather than a congregation.

The church was born with the West End itself. In 1662 Henry Jermyn, first Earl of St Albans, was granted land for residential development on what was then the outskirts of London, the district that still bears his name in Jermyn Street and St James's Square, and he set aside ground for a parish church and churchyard on the south side of the road that became Piccadilly. Christopher Wren was appointed architect in 1672, and the church was consecrated on 13 July 1684 by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, with the parish of St James created the following year. Wren built in red brick with Portland stone dressings, and inside created one of his most influential interiors: galleries on three sides carried on square pillars, and a barrel-vaulted nave supported on Corinthian columns, a scheme he had first tried at St Clement Danes. The church's twin glories are by Grinling Gibbons, the greatest carver of the age: the marble font and the limewood reredos, garlanded with fruit and flowers, while the west wall is dominated by his sumptuous carved and gilded oak organ case, made originally for the Roman Catholic chapel of Whitehall Palace and installed here with its Renatus Harris organ in 1691. The organ itself was entirely rebuilt by J. C. Bishop in 1852; today the historic case stands empty, an electronic instrument deputising while plans mature to build a new organ within it. An outside pulpit, designed by Temple Moore and carved by Laurence Arthur Turner, was added on the north wall in 1902.

The first rector was Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury, beginning an extraordinary clerical succession: William Wake and Thomas Secker also went on to Canterbury, Samuel Clarke the philosopher held the living for twenty years, and William Temple, rector from 1914 to 1918, became perhaps the most celebrated Archbishop of Canterbury of the twentieth century. The conductor Leopold Stokowski served as choirmaster from 1902 to 1905 before leaving for New York and immortality. The registers read like a roll-call of British culture: Sir Joseph Banks was baptised here in 1743 and William Blake in 1757, and on 20 August 1773 the church baptised, under the name John Stuart, Ottobah Cugoano, the formerly enslaved African who became one of the leading abolitionists in Britain. Weddings have included the artist Angelica Kauffman's unfortunate 1767 marriage to a bigamous imposter calling himself Frederick de Horn; the explorer George Bass, of Bass Strait, in 1800; Samuel Baker, explorer of Africa, who in 1865 married Florence von Sass, whom he had rescued from a slave market; and the poet Robert Graves, who married Nancy Nicholson in 1918 with George Mallory, later lost on Everest, as best man. Among the burials are the satirist John Arbuthnot, the royal gardener Charles Bridgeman, designer of the Serpentine, the pioneering woman artist Mary Beale, the caricaturist James Gillray, the anatomist William Hunter, the physician Thomas Sydenham, the marine painters Willem van de Velde elder and younger, and "Old Q", the notorious fourth Duke of Queensberry.

On 14 October 1940 the church was severely damaged in the London Blitz. After the war Sir Albert Richardson restored it, the work completed in 1954 with the old lead-covered spire replaced by a much lighter fibreglass copy; the restored interior, with its pews and light fittings, is a rare survival of a complete suite of church furnishings by Richardson. In the churchyard Viscount Southwood created a garden of remembrance "to commemorate the courage and fortitude of the people of London", opened by Queen Mary in 1946 as Southwood Garden.

Like many central London churches, St James's dwindled in the 1960s and 1970s, and when Donald Reeves was offered the post of rector in 1980 the bishop allegedly told him, "I don't mind what you do, just keep it open." Reeves and his successors did much more: through the 1980s and 1990s the church grew into a progressive, liberal and campaigning community, centred on the Eucharist and expressed in a profusion of groups, from spiritual explorers, labyrinth walking and Julian prayer meetings to an LGBT group and the Vagabonds, a discussion circle named from a William Blake poem which, faithful to its text, meets in a local alehouse. The community has actively supported the ordination of women to all orders of the church and the just treatment of asylum seekers and people in poverty, celebrating what it calls the "radical welcome" of the Gospels. Since 2010 the rector has been Lucy Winkett, one of the most prominent women priests in the Church of England. The church's openness has occasionally drawn fire, as when a drag show held there in 2023 was criticised as inappropriate, but its creative life has flourished: concerts by artists from R.E.M. and Laura Marling to John Grant and Devin Townsend; sculpture exhibitions with Hauser and Wirth in Southwood Garden; the 2013 "Bethlehem Unwrapped" installation, a replica section of the Israeli West Bank barrier that deliberately blocked the view of the church; Turner Prize nominee Jesse Darling's Miserere in 2022; and, in September 2023, murals by the Trinidadian painter Che Lovelace marking the 250th anniversary of Cugoano's baptism, the church's first permanent art commission and the first artwork anywhere in the world to commemorate the abolitionist. In May 2024 St James's became the first church ever to mount a show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, winning gold with Robert Myers's "Imagine the World to be Different", in support of the Wren Project to revitalise church and garden.

The parish's history extends beyond Piccadilly. A detached burial ground in Camden, used from 1790 to 1853 alongside a chapel of ease by Thomas Hardwick, became St James's Gardens in 1878 and was partly built over when Euston station expanded in the 1880s. Closed in 2017 for the High Speed 2 rail project, it yielded one of the largest archaeological excavations ever undertaken in Britain: some 40,000 burials were exhumed between 2018 and 2020, most for reinterment at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, though the remains of the great navigator Matthew Flinders, identified in January 2019, were reburied in his home village of Donington in Lincolnshire. Also buried there had been the auctioneer James Christie, the politician Lord George Gordon and the Black boxing pioneer Bill Richmond. Through it all, Wren's brick church behind its courtyard market remains one of Piccadilly's living landmarks, its doors open daily between the bookshops and the Royal Academy, three and a half centuries after the Earl of St Albans set its ground aside.