St Mary Magdalene church, Richmond, London

St Mary Magdalene, Richmond, is the historic parish church of Richmond in south-west London — a Grade II* listed building on Paradise Road, in the Anglican Diocese of Southwark, dedicated to Jesus' companion Mary Magdalene. Built in the early sixteenth century when Henry VII was transforming Sheen into Richmond, it has been so greatly altered that, apart from the tower, the visible fabric dates from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — yet within its walls lies an extraordinary company: the man who wrote "Rule, Britannia!", the greatest Shakespearean actor of the Regency stage, the founder of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the ashes of Lord Attenborough.

The first chapel here was built around 1220. The church was entirely reconstructed during the reign of Henry VII, who, after rebuilding the royal palace of Sheen, renamed the town Richmond in 1501 — and the two lower stages of the tower survive from that Tudor rebuilding, re-faced in flint in 1904. The church then grew piece by piece: a south aisle was added to the nave in the early seventeenth century, the north aisle in 1699, and the original nave and south aisle were rebuilt in 1750, with iron window frames replacing the original windows in 1850. In 1866 the architect Arthur Blomfield replaced the plaster nave ceiling with timberwork — judged "inappropriate" by Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner — built new galleries, and swapped the box pews for benches. The major remaking came in 1903–04, when George Frederick Bodley, one of the great church architects of his age, replaced the chancel with a new Neo-Gothic chancel, two chapels — the Chapel of All Souls and the Chapel of All Saints — and a vestry, while the tower was faced with flint and stone to match the new east end and the north and south galleries were removed. The west gallery followed in 1935–36.

The monuments make the church a roll-call of Richmond lives across five centuries. The oldest is a brass plaque to Robert Cotton, who died in 1591 after serving as a courtier to Mary I and Elizabeth I. Henry Brouncker, 3rd Viscount Brouncker, who died in 1688, was Cofferer of the Household to Charles II and Gentleman of the Bedchamber to James, Duke of York, the future James II; he is buried here with a memorial. Near the font lies the poet James Thomson, who wrote the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia!" and died in 1748 — his brass memorial was placed in the church in 1792 by David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan. The church also holds a memorial to Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam, founder of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, who died in 1816, and to his grandfather Sir Matthew Decker, the merchant and writer on trade who was High Sheriff of Surrey in 1729 and died in 1749.

The theatre is richly represented. Edmund Kean, the mercurial genius of the Shakespearean stage, died in 1833 and is buried in the church with a memorial inside; the actor Richard Yates, who died in 1796, was buried in the chancel at his own request by his second wife, the celebrated actress Mary Ann Yates — whose age was recorded as forty-nine, though she was probably born in Birmingham in 1728. Literature has its place too: Barbara Hofland, author and poet, who died in 1844, is buried in the church with a memorial, and there is a memorial to the hugely popular novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, who lived in Richmond, died in 1915 and lies in Richmond Cemetery. Among the sculpture are a monument to Barbara Lowther (died 1805) by John Flaxman, and the memorial tablet to Samuel Paynter, High Sheriff of Surrey in 1839, with two full-length marble angels by Edward Hodges Baily RA — the sculptor of Nelson atop Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Memorials on the north wall commemorate George Wakefield (died 1776) and his sons Thomas, who succeeded his father as Minister of the church until his own death in 1806, and Gilbert Wakefield, the scholar and controversialist, who died in 1801. In the churchyard, the local philanthropist William Hickey, who died in 1727 and whose bequest funded Hickey's Almshouses in Richmond, rests in an altar tomb. And in our own century, the ashes of Richard Attenborough, Lord Attenborough — actor, filmmaker, entrepreneur and politician, who lived on Richmond Green and died in 2014 — are interred in a vault beside those of his wife Sheila, their daughter Jane Holland and his granddaughter Lucy, the latter two lost in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

The tower contains a ring of eight bells bearing dates between 1680 and 1761, re-hung in a clockwise ring in the 1980s, with a tenor of almost nineteen hundredweight. The organ was built in 1907 by J. W. Walker & Sons, who cleaned it in 1929 and restored it in 1965. Among notable clergy, Eyre Chatterton — the Anglican author who served as Bishop of Nagpur in India from 1903 to 1926, and an amateur tennis player besides — was appointed curate here in 1900.

Since 1996 St Mary Magdalene's has been part of the Richmond Team Ministry, together with the churches of St John the Divine and St Matthias. It maintains a strong musical tradition with choral services every Sunday — the Tudor tower of Henry VII's Richmond still presiding over a church where Britannia's poet, Kean the tragedian and the maker of Gandhi all found their rest.