St Mary Matfelon

St Mary Matfelon, popularly known as St Mary's, Whitechapel, was the ancient parish church that gave its name to the whole district of Whitechapel in the East End of London. For nearly seven centuries a church stood on Whitechapel Road, but the last of them was destroyed in the Blitz and demolished in 1952, and its site is now the public open space of Altab Ali Park. Though the church itself is gone, its memory survives in the very name of Whitechapel, and in the green space — marked by the outline of its old footprint — that occupies its former churchyard.

The church's origins lie in the Middle Ages. A "white chapel" stood here by 1282, built as a chapel of ease for the western part of the vast parish of Stepney, just outside the city gate at Aldgate. According to long tradition, the chapel was coated in a bright whitewash of lime and chalk, and its prominent position at the junction of the high road made it such a landmark that the whole area came to be known as Whitechapel. By about 1320 the chapel had become a parish church in its own right, under the curious name of St Mary Matfelon — a name whose meaning has been much debated, perhaps deriving from a medieval benefactor of that surname. It was the second-oldest church in Stepney, after St Dunstan's.

Over the centuries the church was the scene of some remarkable events. In 1511 one of its parishioners, the merchant Richard Hunne, fell into a dispute with the priest over the burial of his infant son and dared to challenge the authority of the church courts in the common-law courts; arrested on a charge of heresy, he was found dead in his cell in 1514 in circumstances that many believed to be murder by church officials — a cause célèbre on the eve of the Reformation. In 1713 a Jacobite rector installed a scandalous new altarpiece depicting the Last Supper, in which a hostile Whig dean was painted in the guise of Judas Iscariot; crowds flocked to see it before it was ordered to be removed.

The church was rebuilt more than once. The medieval building was taken down in 1673, and the church that replaced it was itself rebuilt in grand Victorian style, largely at the expense of a local Member of Parliament, and re-consecrated in 1877. After a fire in 1880 it was rebuilt again and reopened in 1882, with seating for some 1,600 worshippers and an external pulpit from which sermons were sometimes preached in Yiddish, reflecting the large Jewish community of the district. By the late nineteenth century St Mary's was one of the best-attended churches in the East End, its noble spire rising some two hundred feet above the crowded streets, and its clergy ministering to a parish of twenty thousand souls, "Jew and Gentile alike", amid the poverty and struggling industries of Whitechapel. The church even had its own "Whitechapel Mission", supported for many years by a public school far away in Somerset.

The end came on the night of 29 December 1940, when a German fire raid during the Blitz destroyed the church. It was left in ruins, and finally demolished in 1952. In 1966 the site was laid out as a public garden, now known as Altab Ali Park, and the stone outline of the church's nave is all that remains to mark where it stood. Among those once buried here were the mutineer Richard Parker, hanged for his part in the Nore mutiny of 1797 and given Christian burial after his wife exhumed his body; the philanthropist Sir John Cass; and the clockmaker Ahasuerus Fromanteel. Today the park is a valued green space and a place of memory in the heart of one of London's most diverse and historic districts.

The former site of the church lies on Whitechapel Road, at the western end of Whitechapel in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The bustling Whitechapel Market, the Royal London Hospital, the Whitechapel Gallery, the streets associated with the Victorian East End, Brick Lane with its curry houses and Sunday markets, the City of London nearby, and the wider East End are all within easy reach.

From the medieval "white chapel" that gave Whitechapel its name, through the dramatic case of Richard Hunne, the great Victorian church and its mission to the East End poor, to its destruction in the Blitz and its survival as Altab Ali Park, St Mary Matfelon gathers seven centuries of London's history into one site. A lost church whose name lives on in the district it served, it remains a powerful presence in the story of the East End.