St. Mary's Church, Hanwell

St Mary's Parish Church, Hanwell, stands at the western end of Church Road in west London, on the highest point in Hanwell with a commanding view over the River Brent valley — a Church of England parish church whose recorded history reaches back to at least the twelfth century, and whose Victorian rebuilding came from the young George Gilbert Scott, who lived to call his own design "a mass of horrors."

The site is older than any document. Its commanding topographical position — from which the distinctive broach spire can be seen for many miles — led the local historian Sir Montagu Sharpe KC DL, a member of the Society of Antiquaries, to suggest that this may have been a pagan place of worship long before Christianity reached this part of the world, though no hard archaeological evidence supports the theory. Sharpe pointed to suggestive patterns: the field boundaries of Hanwell, mostly grubbed out since, roughly matched the measurements and orientation of Roman "limes" land divisions, with the gate and path of Perivale's parish church of St Mary standing at exactly the north-east corner. Nearby St Mary's, Northolt — also on high ground — has yielded much evidence of occupation by the Beaker people, and historians have suggested a Roman villa beneath it; these elevated sites, with St Mary's Harrow on the Hill and Castle Bar, are all visible to one another, natural gathering places for people of any belief. The first church here may have been built in the time of St Dunstan, around 954 AD, but records are sparse; the first firm evidence is from the mid-twelfth century, when this was the mother church of an ancient parish that then stretched south to the Thames at what is now New Brentford.

By the nineteenth century the old Georgian building — despite gaining a gallery in 1823 — had become too small for the growing population, and a new and larger church was commissioned. The design went to George Gilbert Scott, then a young architect riding the Gothic Revival: he gave Hanwell Gothic arches, flint walls with white brick quoins, and a south-west bell tower topped with the broach spire that remains a widely visible landmark. The church was consecrated by Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London, on 27 April 1842. Scott himself was never satisfied with this early effort — he later described it as "a mass of horrors" and recognised that omitting a chancel had been a mistake. The chancel, with a second vestry by W. Pywell, was finally added in 1898, and the wall paintings in it are thought to be the work of the famous painter William Frederick Yeames — best known for "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" — who was at one time the building's churchwarden. The east lancet windows are notable for their early use of vivid, hard, bright colours, depicting the Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection.

The monuments gather a remarkably varied company. The great philanthropist and reformer Jonas Hanway — campaigner for chimney sweeps' boys and reputedly the first Londoner to carry an umbrella — was buried in the crypt on 13 September 1786, though his memorial plaque is in Westminster Abbey. Behind the pulpit is a fine memorial to Margaret Emma Orde, wife of Sir John Orde, 1st Baronet, sculpted by van Gilder, who often worked with Robert Adam. At the western end on the south side stands a bronze bust of the missionary Revd Alec Field, killed in 1915 when the steamship Falaba was torpedoed by U-28 — his fellow missionary Alice Wait left an account of the warning, the attack and the last time she saw him. In the north-east corner a plaque commemorates Bombardier Billy Wells, the English heavyweight boxer remembered today as the man striking the gong at the start of every Rank Organisation film; a familiar figure on the local golf course, his ashes rest in the crypt. In the graveyard, the Glasse family monument holds a Grade II listing from English Heritage.

The rectors have their own stories. The most famous was Dr George H. Glasse, son of the previous rector Samuel Glasse — a great Greek and Latin scholar, writer and man of social influence, who in 1809 built The Hermitage, the Grade II listed cottage orné that still stands five hundred feet west of the church: Pevsner called it "a peach of an early c19 Gothic thatched cottage with two pointed windows, a quatrefoil, and an ogee arched door, all on a minute scale." Glasse's end was tragic: four years after his second marriage, in dire financial straits and with his mind deranged by worry, he hanged himself at a London inn on 30 October 1809. The Revd Derwent Coleridge, instituted in 1864, was a distinguished scholar and author — and son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Lake poet; to serve the growing parish he established St Mark's Church on the corner of Green Lane and Lower Boston Road, a building that survives as flats. In modern times the rector from 1969 was Fred Secombe, brother of the Goon and singer Harry Secombe, who featured in national news reports before returning to Wales and becoming a prolific author. John Weeks served in the 1980s; Matthew Grayshon for twenty-three years until moving to St Mary's, Amport; and the current rector, the Revd Andrew Dand, joined St Mary's in June 2017.

The church has a sideline in show business. With no passing traffic to interrupt filming, St Mary's has appeared in Carry On Constable (1960), the ITV period drama Shine On Harvey Moon (1993), Staggered (1994) with Martin Clunes as a man late for his own wedding, a Peep Show wedding (2007), and two weddings in Not Going Out (2009 and 2014). Scott's "mass of horrors" has aged into something better loved than its architect ever allowed: the spire on Hanwell's hill, seen for miles along the Brent valley, keeping a sacred site that may be older than England itself.