St Luke's Church, West Norwood

St Luke's Church is an Anglican church in West Norwood, south London, worshipping in a Grade II* listed building that stands on a prominent triangular site where Norwood Road forks into Knights Hill and Norwood High Street. A dignified Greek Revival church of the 1820s, it is one of London's "Waterloo churches" and holds, in its tower, a clock of national importance — the first flat-bed turret clock in England.

When St Luke's was built, West Norwood was still sparsely populated, mostly meadows cleared from the old North Wood, with a scattering of cottages and villas. The church was designed by Francis Octavius Bedford in 1822 under the Church Building Act of 1818, passed after the Napoleonic Wars to provide churches for the growing urban population. It is a "Commissioners' church," receiving a grant of £6,447 towards its total cost of £12,947, and was built alongside St Matthew's, Brixton, St Mark's, Kennington, and St John's, Waterloo Road. These four "Waterloo churches," each dedicated to one of the four Gospel writers, were required to seat 1,800–2,000 worshippers, to have burial vaults, to be built of brick with stone dressings, and to cost no more than £13,000 each. The foundation stone of St Luke's was laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury on 14 April 1823, the builder was Mrs Elizabeth Broomfield of Walworth, and the church was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester on 25 July 1825. Its main front presents a stone portico of six fluted columns in a simplified Corinthian order, with a tower rising in three stages behind, and it closely resembles Bedford's St John's, Waterloo, and his churches at Camberwell and Trinity Square, Southwark.

Unusually, St Luke's is oriented north–south rather than east–west. This was forced on it by a planning stipulation that no building in Lower Norwood could be raised within a hundred feet of an existing one without the owner's consent; an objection from the owner of the Horn's Tavern meant the church had to be turned to avoid encroaching on the inn. The internal arrangement created some confusion, as the altar was placed against a long wall with the pulpit opposite, prompting the antiquary Thomas Allen to remark in 1827 that a visitor expecting the altar would instead find a gallery, and the pulpit "in an unusual and awkward situation." The interior was transformed in 1872–73 by G. E. Street, who created a conventional chancel at the end opposite the entrance, divided the nave with Romanesque arcades carrying a plaster barrel vault, and removed the galleries, more than halving the seating. Later changes adapted the building for modern use: in 1976 the chancel was divided into upper and lower halls with kitchen and toilet facilities, and in 2005 the pews were replaced with red chairs usually arranged to face south.

The church's clock, installed by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy in 1827 at a cost of £357 — three per cent of the entire building budget — is nationally significant. Having travelled on the Continent in 1825 to study new technology, Vulliamy returned with a fresh way of laying out his turret-clock mechanisms, and put it into practice here, giving St Luke's the first flat-bed turret clock in England, with his self-levelling pallets and a two-second pendulum with a heavy bob. The original slate dials were replaced with opal glass for backlighting in 1928, and after years out of action the clock was conserved and repaired by the Cumbria Clock Company, the work completed in May 2017.

Between 1825 and 1894 some 1,383 people were buried at St Luke's, in the churchyard or the vaults beneath, and the churchyard is now legally closed to further burials. Its lower, northern part was given to Lambeth Council after the Second World War and turned into a war memorial garden, used on the first Sunday of most months for refreshments connected with the Norwood Feast, while the upper, southern part remains church-owned. The ornate railings, taken for wartime salvage, were restored in 2009, though the elaborate entrance gates from Knights Hill are still missing. As the mother church from which the parishes of Holy Trinity Tulse Hill, Christ Church Gipsy Hill and others were carved, St Luke's remains a confident landmark of Greek Revival London at the heart of West Norwood.