St Mary Magdalene, Woolwich

St Mary Magdalene Woolwich is an eighteenth-century Anglican church standing on a spur of high ground above the Thames in Woolwich, south-east London — the parish church of a riverside settlement whose Christian roots reach back more than thirteen centuries, and whose churchyard garden, with its lamenting lion over a boxer's tomb, offers one of the best views on the river.

Christianity in Woolwich goes back to the Early Middle Ages. In 2015 Oxford Archaeology discovered a Saxon burial site near the Thames east of the Woolwich Ferry containing seventy-six skeletons of the late seventh or early eighth century — the absence of grave goods indicating an early Christian settlement. The first church in Woolwich was probably pre-Conquest and dedicated to St Lawrence, standing on a promontory about thirty-seven metres north of the present church, roughly where the belvedere overlooking the river is now. From the early tenth to the mid-twelfth century Woolwich was ruled, remarkably, by the abbots of St Peter's Abbey in Ghent — probably the result of a gift from Ælfthryth, daughter of King Alfred and Countess of Flanders. Around 1100 Henry I gave the church to Gundulf, bishop and prior of Rochester, and it was probably then rebuilt in stone; its tower, with walls of chalk and flint, was partly excavated in 1970. The parish church was dedicated first to St Lawrence, then in the fifteenth century to the Virgin Mary, and a century later to St Mary Magdalene. The first known rector was John Chaplain, mentioned in 1182; the late fourteenth-century rector William de Prene rebuilt the bell tower, and in the early sixteenth century rector John Sweetyng assisted in building the Great Harry — Henry VIII's flagship — at Woolwich Dockyard, the royal yard that defined the town.

By the eighteenth century the Elizabethan spire had collapsed and the foundations were straining, so a new church — the present one — was built from 1732 to 1739 close to the medieval site. No architect's name is known; there probably was none, plain brick churches with round-headed windows having been built around London since the 1670s. Part-funded by the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches and built by Matthew Spray, a bricklayer from Deptford, it consumed 636,000 bricks, and was dedicated on 9 May 1740, after which the old church was demolished and the churchyard extended and walled. The church is brick with Portland stone plinth cappings, copings, window surrounds and principal cornice, its west bell tower topped off rather bluntly, without balustrade, spire or lantern. Inside is a five-bay nave flanked by colonnades — similar to St Nicholas, Deptford — with two galleried aisles, painted pale blue and white. The pipe organ was made by John Byfield in 1754, originally in the west gallery, and the royal coat of arms of 1740, once above the sanctuary, now hangs in the tower porch.

The Victorians added ambition. Adelbert Anson, appointed rector in 1875 at thirty-four, commissioned designs for a whole new church — the most ambitious a Gothic Revival scheme by James Brooks — but nothing came of them; his successor Samuel Gilbert Scott had his cousin J. O. Scott design a new chancel with crypt and vestries, completed in 1894 in brick with Bath stone buttress cappings and a pedimented gable. The old oak reredos was adapted for the south Lady Chapel — which contains the rare cast-iron tomb of Henry Maudslay, the great Woolwich-born engineer and father of machine-tool making, designed by himself — beneath a stained glass window of 1922 by Herbert Hendrie. A rail-mounted moveable walnut pulpit with inlays was installed in 1899, funded by public subscription for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. At the same period the churchyard became a public garden: St Mary's Garden, designed in 1893 by Fanny Wilkinson, Britain's first professional woman landscape gardener, in the English landscape style with gravel paths, lawns and mature trees. Gravestones survive along the north-eastern border, and nearby stands the tomb of the bare-knuckle boxing champion Tom Cribb, who lived in Woolwich — shaped as a lamenting lion resting its paw on an urn. Two belvederes give fine views of the Thames and the Woolwich Ferry. The park was enlarged and redesigned in the early 1960s by G. P. Youngman, with new paths, raised beds and alpine rockeries.

The church survived the Second World War with little damage — its wartime rector Cuthbert Bardsley later became Bishop of Coventry — and was listed in 1954. Then in 1960 came one of the most talked-about experiments in postwar Anglicanism: the young rector Nicolas Stacey and his "Woolwich Project" (1960–68). Controversial but energising, Stacey shut off the aisles and galleries with frosted glass panels to create a café and offices, converted the crypt into a youth club, and opened the "Coffee House" in May 1961 with Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones in attendance; from 1965 he brought the local Presbyterians to share the building with the Anglicans, an arrangement that lasted until 2001. In the 1970s the parish merged into the three-church parish of Woolwich; restoration work followed in 1977, and in 2008 the gallery partitions were removed, restoring the spatial integrity of the Georgian interior. In May 2019 St Mary's Church and Gardens became part of the Woolwich Conservation Area — the brick church on its ancient promontory, watching the river that brought Saxon Christians, Ghent abbots, Tudor shipwrights and the Woolwich Ferry beneath its walls.