St Mark's, Mayfair

St Mark's, Mayfair, on North Audley Street in the heart of London's most exclusive district, is a Grade I listed former Anglican church whose two centuries of life read like a history of Mayfair itself: built for the aristocracy at the height of the Regency, host to presidents, first ladies and royal weddings, abandoned and at risk for decades, and now — in the building's latest reinvention — home to Mercato Mayfair, one of London's most spectacular food halls, trading beneath the old church roof since 2019.

The church was built in 1825–28 in answer to a real shortage: Mayfair's population had swelled as the aristocracy and the wealthy moved in from the country, filling the new town houses of the Grosvenor estate, and the parish churches could not hold them. The commission went to John Peter Gandy, an architect who worked almost entirely in Neo-classical modes, and St Mark's is reckoned among the finest of his designs. He built it in the Greek Revival style, and its thirty-four-foot façade with its elegant porch — a screen of Greek columns drawn straight from the Athens of the antiquaries — is known as one of the finest in London. Half a century later, in 1878, Arthur Blomfield substantially remade the interior, introducing a Romanesque open roof structure, wall decoration and architectural detail, so that the building wears a Greek face over a Victorian heart.

The roll of people associated with St Mark's is extraordinary for a single parish church. Edward Thomas Daniell, remembered for his watercolours of the Near East and his etchings of Norfolk, was appointed to the curacy in 1834. During the Second World War the church became informally known as "The American Church in London", thanks to its proximity to the United States embassy in Grosvenor Square and its role as a centre for American worshippers far from home — and its visitors in those years included General Dwight Eisenhower, the future president, and Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady of the United States. On 29 September 1949 the church staged one of the society weddings of the age: George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, married the pianist Marion Stein before a congregation that included King George VI and other members of the royal family, with a wedding anthem specially composed and conducted by Benjamin Britten performed at the service — a piece of musical history made on North Audley Street.

Music runs right through the church's story. St Mark's has associations with Victorian opera through the great baritone Sir Charles Santley and with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. J. W. Elliott, a former organist here, composed the tune "Day of Rest" for the hymn "O Jesus, I Have Promised", still sung wherever English hymnody travels. Its organists also included John Williams, the first Master of Music at the Tower of London, and Margaret Cobb, the first woman to play the organ at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. The original Rushworth and Dreaper organ found a new home at Holy Trinity Brompton, and the church now possesses a three-manual instrument by J. W. Walker & Sons, recently re-commissioned, with plans for its further redevelopment with the organ builders Bishop and Son. In recent years the building has hosted concerts by the London Russian Music School and performances by musicians of the calibre of the violinist Nicola Benedetti, alongside local choirs and ensembles.

The church's decline followed the familiar arc of central London congregations. Attendance dwindled through the 1950s and 1960s until St Mark's was declared redundant in 1974 and deconsecrated; it then stood empty from 1975 to 1994, spending more than twenty years on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register — a Grade I building (listed in 1958) slowly decaying in the richest quarter of London. In 1994 the Diocese of London allowed the Commonwealth Christian Fellowship, led by Rod and Julie Anderson, to take the building on. With a congregation of around 120, the fellowship made the old church a base for practical outreach — anti-knife-crime training for teenagers, home visits to the elderly, help for the homeless — and used the building in this way until 2008, its tenure formally ending in June 2014. The church briefly hosted the congregation of This Present House between February and May 2015, the last Christian worship under its roof.

The building's afterlife has been as eventful as its prime. In 2006 Hammer Holdings won planning permission to convert it into a "wellness centre", only for a campaign led by Lady Sainsbury to block the scheme. One Events then acquired it as a mixed-use venue, One Mayfair, which opened in 2009 and hosted everything from Nike launches to the London Summer Show and London Fashion Week. In July 2014 the freehold returned to Grosvenor Estates — the historic landlords of Mayfair — and since November 2019 the church has flourished as Mercato Mayfair, a food hall operated by Mercato Metropolitano, where Londoners eat and drink beneath Blomfield's open roof and Gandy's Greek portico still commands North Audley Street. Few buildings anywhere have moved from Eleanor Roosevelt to artisan pizza with their dignity so intact: the façade remains one of London's finest, the Grade I listing protects every detail, and the crowds that fill it daily arguably bring the building closer to its old parish bustle than it has been in seventy years.