St Luke's Kentish Town

St Luke's Kentish Town, on Oseney Crescent in north London, is an active Church of England parish church with a resurrection story: closed in 1991 and handed to the Churches Conservation Trust, it stood silent for twenty years before reopening in 2011 as a Holy Trinity Brompton church plant. The Grade II* listed building was the very first church of Basil Champneys, one of the most distinguished architects of the late Victorian age.

The church owes its existence to the railways. When St Luke's Church on the Euston Road was demolished for railway expansion, the company paid £12,500 in compensation, which — together with the proceeds of the old site's sale — funded a new church in Kentish Town, built between 1867 and 1869. John Johnson, architect of the Euston Road church, hoped for the commission; to his disappointment it went instead to the 25-year-old Basil Champneys, whose father, William Weldon Champneys, vicar of the parish of St Pancras, had commissioned the building. It was the younger Champneys' first church and among his first buildings of any kind — the start of a career that would produce Newnham College Cambridge and the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

Champneys built in red brick with stone dressings under tiled roofs, giving Kentish Town a tower in the North German manner with a saddleback gabled roof, three arcaded belfry openings and plate tracery above, while the four-bay nave, narrow aisles and chancel are Early English Revival. The chancel sits beneath the tower, ending in a polygonal apse with plate tracery; the west end has three lancets under a plate-tracery rose window. Inside, the walls are exposed red brick banded with stone, the nave arcades ride on low cylindrical pillars with shafts between the arches carrying the principal roof timbers, the floor is paved in red and black tiles, and steps climb from the crossing to the brick-vaulted chancel and again to the sanctuary with its decorative tiles and sedilia.

The glass is a Victorian anthology. The three east windows, part of the original build, were designed by Henry Holiday and made by Heaton, Butler and Bayne, who also produced the aisle windows of the twelve apostles (about 1880–90) and the west window of 1891. In 1910 Morris & Co added four windows to the south clerestory — two from figures by Edward Burne-Jones and two by John Henry Dearle. A Willis organ was installed in 1893, a reredos in the 1930s, and the brass eagle lectern of 1882 came from St Paul's Camden Square — war-damaged, and united in benefice with St Luke's from 1955 to 1987.

Decline closed the church in 1991, and the Churches Conservation Trust kept it safe through two empty decades. Then in 2011 a pastoral measure reopened St Luke's with the Revd Jonathan March as parish priest, leading a church plant from the Holy Trinity Brompton network; HTB's renovation was completed in January 2012, and services recommenced on 29 January 2012.

The revived church later faced public scrutiny over its treatment of a gay parishioner. A woman who had been a regular member said she was frozen out of the congregation after coming out as a lesbian to Mr March in 2019, an experience she said left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and needing three years of counselling. The Diocese of London investigated, with the Ven Rosemary Lain-Priestley, adviser to the Bishop of London, examining whether clergy conduct guidelines had been breached. The inquiry found that St Luke's had been negligent in its treatment of the woman and acknowledged pastoral failings, while clearing Mr March of abuse of power; he called the episode "by far one of my biggest regrets... we came to the wrong side of a wrong decision, a bad call." The report recommended that the church draw up a policy on sex and relationships and that Mr March undertake training in handling difficult conversations, though some measures — including a risk assessment for LGBT+ and vulnerable people — were delayed or not carried out. The diocese said it continued to support the woman and that Mr March worked closely with the Bishop of Edmonton on a way forward for the parish.

St Luke's continues today as part of the HTB network — Champneys' first church, with its Burne-Jones glass and its complicated present, once more filled on Sundays after a generation of silence.