St Margaret's Church, Barking

St Margaret's Church — the Church of St Margaret of Antioch — is the Church of England parish church of Barking in East London, a Grade I listed building standing within the grounds of Barking Abbey, the ruins of the royal monastery originally established in the seventh century. Dedicated to Margaret the Virgin of Antioch, the church carries eight centuries of history on its thirteenth-century site — including the wedding of the greatest navigator England ever produced.

The church originated as a chapel for local people within the abbey grounds, south of the great abbey church. Its oldest part is the chancel, built early in the thirteenth century in the reign of King John, and the building is said to have been made a parish church in 1300 by Anne de Vere, abbess of Barking. Until the 1390s Barking formed a rectory held by the abbey and divided into two vicarages: "Northstrete", probably funded by income from the Ilford area, and "Southstrete", serving the abbey church. Severe flooding in the late fourteenth century brought financial difficulties and a merger of the two vicarages from 1398, with a chaplain from the abbey leading worship. The present bell tower was added late in the fifteenth century.

When the abbey was dissolved, the church remained parochial, the rectory and advowson devolving to the Crown, which leased them in 1540 to the widow Mary Blackenhall for twenty-one years. In 1557 they were bought by Robert Thomas and Andrew Salter with money from the estate of William Pownsett of nearby Loxford and granted to All Souls College, Oxford — on wonderfully specific terms: the vicar was to pray every Sunday for the souls of Pownsett, his parents and benefactors; to distribute six shillings and eightpence among twenty poor people annually on the anniversary of Pownsett's death; to pay the College an annual sum to maintain two poor scholars; and to be absent from the parish no more than eighty days a year. The College duly presented at the next vacancy in 1560; the Crown contested its right at the following one, but lost the ensuing lawsuit, and Sir John Petre reconfirmed the 1557 grant in 1594 — quietly dropping the now-uncomfortable requirement to pray for the dead. The right of presentation is today shared between All Souls College, the Bishop of Chelmsford, in whose diocese the church now falls, and the church's own churchwardens — of whom, unusually, there are three rather than two.

The church's most famous day came on 21 December 1762, when the maritime explorer, cartographer and naval officer Captain James Cook married Elizabeth Batts at St Margaret's — her father, Samuel Batts, keeper of the Bell Inn at Wapping, had been one of Cook's mentors. Ten years later the nave, chancel and sanctuary ceilings were plastered, though the nave ceiling was stripped again in 1842. The interior was restored between 1929 and 1936 by Charles Winmill and George Jack — craftsmen of the Arts and Crafts tradition — and the building was Grade I listed in 1954, with a late twentieth-century extension along the south side providing an office, bookshop and refectory.

The burials and monuments hold rich stories. Sir Charles Montagu (c.1564–1625) of Cranbrook Hall in the parish, a politician who sat in the Commons from 1614 to 1625, is commemorated by a remarkable mural monument depicting his small effigy fully armed, sitting in a military tent on campaign; its inscription records that "the worthy knight... gave to ye poore of Barking forty pounds". Henry Fanshawe (1506–1568), MP under Elizabeth I and Queen's Remembrancer from 1565 until his death, lies here. And so does one of Essex's great originals: Daniel Day (1682–1767), founder of the Fairlop Fair, buried in a coffin made from a bough that fell from the Fairlop Oak itself — Fairlop then lying within the ancient parish of Barking.

The roll of vicars is a nursery of bishops. Thomas Cartwright (1660–1689) became Bishop of Chester while still vicar; Hugh Willoughby Jermyn (1870–71) went on to be Bishop of Colombo, Bishop of Brechin and Primus of Scotland; Alfred Blomfield (1871–82) and the great Hensley Henson (1888–95) — later Bishop of Hereford and of Durham, one of the twentieth century's most formidable churchmen — both served here, as did Leslie Hunter (1925–30), later Bishop of Sheffield, William Chadwick (1947–59) and James Roxburgh (1965–77), each later Bishop of Barking, and Denis Wakeling (1959–65), later Bishop of Southwell. More recently Trevor Mwamba, previously Bishop of Botswana, was vicar from 2013 to 2019, with Mark Adams serving since 2021. The medieval lists survive too, naming the vicars of North Barking and South Barking back to Martinus in 1315, before the flood-forced union of 1398.

In the late 1970s the parish became part of a team parish covering Barking with Christ Church and St Patrick's; on 1 January 2017 those two churches gained their own parishes, leaving St Margaret's with a smaller one. The church's tradition is both Anglo-Catholic and open evangelical — a breadth befitting its long history. In 2007 the artist Joost Van Santen joined two small stones from the remains of old medieval London Bridge into a sculpture placed in front of the church, facing the ruins of Barking Abbey — old London stone meeting older Barking stone, where the abbey's chapel has served its town for eight hundred years.