St Mary Magdalen’s Roman Catholic Church

St Mary Magdalen's Roman Catholic Church stands in North Worple Way at Mortlake, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, just south of Mortlake High Street and the River Thames. Dedicated to St Mary Magdalene, the companion of Christ, it is a dignified Gothic Revival church of 1852, but it is above all famous for its remarkable churchyard, which contains the extraordinary tent-shaped tomb of the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and the graves of a great many other notable men and women. It is one of the most historically rich and fascinating Catholic churches in the whole of London.

The church was built at a moment of revival for the Catholic Church in England. It was designed in the Gothic Revival style by Gilbert Blount, architect to Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, and dates from 1852 — only two years after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England. Its first parish priest, Father John Wenham, was himself a sign of the times: a convert from the Oxford Movement who had studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had served as an Anglican army chaplain in Ceylon before being received into the Catholic Church. He is buried in the churchyard he once served.

The interior is notable for its stained glass, which spans the Victorian period and the twentieth century. The east window, by the celebrated glass-maker William Wailes around 1850, shows St Mary Magdalen at its centre, flanked by the "Noli me tangere" scene and an episode from the Gospel of Luke, while the twentieth-century west window takes as its theme "Through Cross to Crown". Several windows commemorate individuals connected with the church, among them the Hon. William Towry Law, a former Chancellor of the Diocese of Bath and Wells who converted to Catholicism in 1851 and whose son died as a missionary priest in Africa, and a window to Sir Richard Burton himself, erected by his widow, depicting him as a knight at prayer.

It is the churchyard, however, that gives St Mary Magdalen's its unique character, for it is the resting place of a remarkable gathering of Victorian and Edwardian figures. Here lies Frances Margaret Taylor, the founder of the religious congregation of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, alongside more than eighty sisters of her order. Here too are buried John Francis Bentley, the architect of Westminster Cathedral; the architect Leonard Stokes, winner of the Royal Gold Medal and president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, together with his brother Sir Frederick Wilfrid Stokes, the engineer who invented the Stokes mortar used so widely in the First World War; the artists Adrian and Marianne Stokes; and the poets Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who together wrote under the single pen-name "Michael Field" and were buried side by side. Soldiers, colonial governors, politicians, bankers, journalists and authors all rest in this crowded and storied ground, including a number of converts whose graves bear witness to the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century.

The most celebrated monument of all is the tomb of Sir Richard Burton, the explorer, linguist, soldier and translator of the Arabian Nights, who died in 1890, and of his wife Isabel, Lady Burton, who died in 1896. Their mausoleum, a Grade II* listed structure, is built in the form of an Arab tent, fashioned from Carrara marble and Forest of Dean stone, and was designed by Lady Burton herself in memory of her husband's love of the desert and the East. It is one of the most extraordinary funerary monuments in England, and draws visitors from around the world. Nearby stands a second mausoleum commemorating the young Comte de Vezlo, who died in 1901 aged only seven, and his mother.

The churchyard also holds the grave of Sir James Marshall, a British colonial judge who did much to spread the Catholic faith in Ghana and Nigeria, with a memorial plaque inside the church unveiled in 1999, a century after his death. His memory is kept alive in a moving way, for the Knights and Ladies of Marshall, a lay association of Ghanaian Catholics named in his honour, make an annual pilgrimage to Mortlake to celebrate a Mass at his grave. The cemetery also contains the war graves of six service personnel of the two World Wars.

Today St Mary Magdalen's continues as a living Roman Catholic parish church, served by its parish and with St Mary Magdalen's Catholic Primary School beside its churchyard. It remains a place of worship, of history and of pilgrimage, where the ordinary life of a Catholic parish goes on amid the memorials of so many remarkable lives.

The church stands at Mortlake, on the south bank of the Thames in south-west London, on the very course of the University Boat Race, which finishes close by. The riverside walks of the Thames Path, Kew Gardens and the Royal Botanic Gardens, the National Archives at Kew, Richmond Park and the historic towns of Richmond and Barnes are all within easy reach, as is central London a short distance to the east.

From its building in 1852 as a church of the restored Catholic hierarchy, through its Victorian stained glass and its extraordinary gathering of notable graves — above all the tent-tomb of Sir Richard Burton — to its life today as a living parish with its enduring links to the Catholic community of Ghana, St Mary Magdalen's Roman Catholic Church, Mortlake, gathers a wealth of history into one place. A Gothic Revival church with one of the most remarkable churchyards in London, it remains a treasured part of the Catholic heritage of the capital.