St Mary Moorfields

St Mary Moorfields is a Roman Catholic church on Eldon Street near Moorgate, on the site once known as Moorfields. It holds a singular distinction: it is the only Catholic church in the City of London. Before a boundary change in 1994 it lay just within the Borough of Hackney, meaning that for a time the City had no Catholic church of its own at all. The present building, opened in 1903, is the latest in a line of chapels and churches reaching back more than three centuries, and it remains a busy place of worship and evangelism at the heart of the financial district.

The Catholic presence here has a long and turbulent history. The first post-Reformation public Catholic chapel in the City was the Lime Street Chapel, set up in 1686 during the brief Catholic reign of James II; it was suppressed after the Revolution of 1688 and later re-established in Grub Street, near Moorfields. The anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 destroyed a chapel in White Street, which was rebuilt after the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791. In 1817 the Reverend Joseph Hunt arranged for a church to be built on the east side of Finsbury Circus; designed by John Newman in the neo-classical style and named St Mary Moorfields, it opened in 1820. Several émigré French noble families were buried here, reflecting the church's role as a centre for London's French Catholic community. When the Catholic hierarchy was restored in England in 1850, St Mary Moorfields was chosen by Cardinal Wiseman as London's pro-cathedral, a status it held until 1869, when the title passed to Our Lady of Victories in Kensington.

Newman's church was demolished in 1899 to make way for the Metropolitan Railway, and a new St Mary Moorfields was designed by George Campbell Sherrin on a cramped site about 140 metres to the north-west, where the entrance had to be fitted in among shop fronts on Eldon Street. Sherrin made a virtue of the constraints, and The British Architect praised the result, observing that "the idea of limitations or difficulty does not occur to one, or, if so, it only suggests that the architect has traded on his difficulties to his own good." The new church was consecrated on 25 March 1903, the Feast of the Annunciation.

The parish has a rich musical history. Its earliest known organ, dating from the later eighteenth century, may have been obtained for the post-Gordon-Riots chapel in White Street and now survives in an Anglican church in Gloucester. A more substantial Bevington organ was installed around 1830 for the Finsbury Circus church, described in 1842 as having three keyboards and nine composition pedals — and its organist was none other than Vincent Novello, the composer and music publisher, who served from 1820 into the 1840s. That instrument was later rebuilt by William Hill & Sons and, when the Finsbury Circus church was demolished, dismantled and re-erected in a Presbyterian church at Ilford in 1905. The organ in the present church, on a gallery at the west end, was made by the firm of Corps and appears to have been bought second-hand.

Today St Mary Moorfields serves as a hub for evangelism, especially among the young professionals who work in the surrounding financial district. It hosts monthly Opus Dei meetings and is affiliated with the St Francis of Assisi Ramblers. From a suppressed chapel of James II's reign, through riot and railway, to a church ingeniously slipped between City shopfronts, St Mary Moorfields has kept the Catholic faith alive in the Square Mile for over three hundred years — the City of London's one Catholic church.