St Jude's Church, Hampstead Garden Suburb

The Parish Church of St Jude-on-the-Hill — usually known simply as St Jude's — is the parish church of Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London, and the ecclesiastical masterpiece of Sir Edwin Lutyens. The suburb itself was founded in 1907 by Henrietta Barnett as a model community where all classes could live together in attractive surroundings and social harmony, and at its highest point, on Central Square, Lutyens raised a church that critics have struggled to categorise and competed to praise: "a building of true originality" and a "key work" of its period (Roslin Mair); "one of the best twentieth-century church exteriors in England" (Simon Jenkins); "one of [Lutyens'] most successful buildings", which "even turns that 'naughtiness' or wilful originality which often mars his late buildings into a decided advantage" (Cherry and Pevsner).

Building began in 1909 and the church was consecrated on 7 May 1911, though the west end was not completed until 1935. Externally the church is 200 feet long, and its spire — "majestic, imperious, Elgarian", in John Leonard's words, a Byzantine spire over the crossing of a building in which "the repudiation of Gothic is total; there is not a pointed arch in the building" — rises 178 feet. Simon Jenkins called the design "the confident application of Queen Anne Revival to traditional church form"; Peter Anson found it "a magnificent Edwardian period piece... gorgeous is the best word to use for the painted ornaments and decorations". Inside, the church runs 122 feet from west door to chancel steps, forty feet to the highest part of the roof, under a barrel-vaulted and domed ceiling: three vaults between the west end and the crossing, a saucer dome over the crossing, a further vault beyond, and a saucer dome over the sanctuary, ending in an apse completed in 1923.

The interior is a painted world, the work of Walter P. Starmer (1877–1961), who began with the Lady Chapel in 1920 and finished with the apse in 1929 — murals unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1924. Starmer had served with the Red Cross and YMCA in the First World War, and many of his paintings of the Western Front hang in the Imperial War Museum. His ceiling panels over the centre aisle depict the wise men and shepherds; Christ feeding the multitude and stilling the storm; Christ healing the blind and lepers; the crucifixion in the dome; and the entry into Jerusalem with Christ carrying the cross. His west window of 1937 shows St Jude holding the cross in his right hand and this very church in his left, his symbol the ship below, and Christ in glory above with the symbols of the four evangelists. The Stations of the Cross, also by Starmer, run through the north and south aisles among murals of the parables of the kingdom.

The church is dense with memory. By the west door is a brass plaque to the horses killed in the First World War, its relief panel of a warhorse carved in 1970 by Rosemary Proctor, replacing a bronze model of a horse by Lutyens' own father — and its replacement — both stolen. The north wall remembers John Raphael, a popular sportsman killed in the Great War, and Father Maxwell Rennie (vicar 1936–1954) in a bust by his daughter Rosemary Proctor; in the lunette above St George's altar, Starmer painted the last moments of Michael Rennie, the vicar's son, who died of exhaustion in 1940 after rescuing several evacuee children when their ship, the SS City of Benares, was torpedoed on its way to Canada. The Lady Chapel — the oldest part of the church, opened in 1910 — has a ceiling painted with heroic women associated with the First World War and the campaign for women's suffrage, a wooden statue reproducing the early sixteenth-century "Nuremberg Madonna", and a Bernini Madonna and Child reproduction in the altar. St John's Chapel, given by the Harmsworth family in 1923, holds a memorial window to Robert Lovel St John Harmsworth by Robert Anning Bell — one of his most charming designs, drawing on seventeenth-century English Baroque monuments — and a green and white marble altar by Lutyens with a central panel by Maurice Greiffenhagen of St John holding a chalice from which a serpent emerges, recalling the legend of the poisoned cup. The fine iron screens flanking the sanctuary are far older than the church, bearing the name Matthias Heit and the date 1710; the high altar incorporates two stones from Canada — one from the former French royal chapel at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, where the first regular Church of England services in Canada were held in 1710, the other from the altar steps of Montreal Cathedral — and the pulpit was also a Canadian gift. The foundation stone, laid on St Mark's Day 1910, is by Eric Gill.

The church's first vicar gave it literary immortality. Evelyn Waugh was confirmed at St Jude's in 1916 and recalled in A Little Learning the "highly flamboyant clergyman named Basil Bourchier... His sermons were dramatic, topical, irrational and quite without theological content... Despite all Mr Bourchier's extravagant display I had some glimpse of higher mysteries." C. S. Lewis preached here twice — "Miracles" in September 1942 and "The Grand Miracle" in April 1945, his signature surviving in the church register.

Music fills the building. The Father Willis organ came originally from St Jude's, Whitechapel — where Canon Samuel Barnett, husband of the suburb's founder Henrietta, had been vicar — stood ten years at the west end, moved to the chancel in 1934, and was rededicated in October 2002 after extensive rebuilding with a new console. Charles Proctor was organist and choirmaster from 1943 to 1973, marrying Rosemary Rennie, the sculptor-daughter of Father Rennie whose work adorns the church; Nicholas Chalmers has been organist and director of music since 1993. The resonant acoustic has made St Jude's a famous recording venue: Evan Parker's solo saxophone album Six of One (1980), Gothic Voices and Emma Kirkby's celebrated Hildegard of Bingen album A Feather on the Breath of God (1981), the Hilliard Ensemble's recording of Arvo Pärt's Passio (1988), and Bryden Thomson's Vaughan Williams cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra, including the Sinfonia antartica (1989), were all made beneath Starmer's domes. Since 1992 the church has hosted the annual Proms at St Jude's music festival.

The church is open at and around service times and occasionally on summer Sunday afternoons; as of 2022 it stands on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register, its condition assessed as "poor" — a reminder that Lutyens' masterpiece, with its hand-painted heavens, needs the care of the generations who inherit it. The adjacent vicarage, also by Lutyens, is Grade II listed, and the long-serving vicar Alan Walker (1994–2021) wrote three books on the church, its artist Starmer, and its "totally preposterous parson" Bourchier — the flamboyant founder-priest of a church like no other in England.