St Mary's Church

St Mary's Church hides in plain sight near the top of Hampstead's hill, at 4 Holly Place on Holly Walk — a Roman Catholic church folded so discreetly into a row of Georgian houses between Church Row and Mount Vernon that it rises no taller than the homes on either side. Grade II* listed, it was the first Catholic church built in Hampstead after the English Reformation, and its story begins with the French Revolution.

Its founder and first pastor was the Abbé Jean-Jacques Morel, one of the émigré priests who fled revolutionary France for England. Supported by a group of founding subscribers — Joseph Lescher, Edward Whiteside, Richard Power, Lewis Raphael, John Kelly, John Lund, George Armstrong and James Coppinger — Morel built his little chapel in under a year, opening its doors in August 1816. By then, with Napoleon finally defeated, most of Hampstead's French refugees had returned home, leaving a regular congregation of about a hundred — swollen each summer by itinerant Irish hay-makers working the fields around the village. Education was Morel's passion: he taught at several private Catholic schools in Hampstead, and two schools, for boys and girls, were established beside the presbytery on the strength of wealthier parishioners' subscriptions. The chapel received at least one visitor of extraordinary pedigree: Marie Thérèse, Duchess of Angoulême — the eldest and only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette — called on the Abbé Morel during her English exile. The marine painter Clarkson Stanfield, another parishioner, painted Morel's portrait.

The church's most distinctive feature came in 1852, when the law changed to permit bells to be rung from Catholic churches. The architect William Wardell — a Catholic convert who would go on to design the cathedrals of Melbourne and Sydney — added the façade with its bell tower and statue of the Virgin and Child, the first addition to the original building and still the church's signature, gleaming white at the head of Holly Walk. Inside, the sanctuary is decorated with tile mosaics, and a painting of the Assumption of Our Lady — the gift of founder George Armstrong on behalf of his daughter Frances Hall — appears in the earliest interior photograph of 1878. A nineteenth-century school behind the church was demolished in 1907 to make way for the present sanctuary and side chapels; the presbytery was remodelled in 1978, and major repairs in 1990 removed the ceiling to expose the roof timbers that now adorn the interior, with a further restoration in 1991–92 — supported by a 1996 gala performance given by parishioner Michael Williams, his wife Dame Judi Dench, and the actor John Moffatt.

Few small churches can match St Mary's roll of names. Graham Greene married Vivienne Dayrell-Browning here on 15 October 1927, the year after his conversion. During the Second World War, General Charles de Gaulle — living with his family at 99 Frognal, now St Dorothy's Convent — was among the parishioners while he led the Free French from London. The influential Catholic religious writer Baron Friedrich von Hügel lived in Hampstead; Charles Forte, founder of the Forte hotel empire, lived nearby in Greenaway Gardens; and Sir George Gilbert Scott, the great Gothic Revival architect, lived at Admiral's House on Admiral's Walk. The carved Stations of the Cross and the Christmas crib figures are the work of Gino Masero (1915–1995), the British-Italian sculptor who carved the statue of Christ above the High Altar of St Paul's Cathedral — a former trainee chef whose talent was discovered when he was asked to carve a table decoration from a block of salt, and who regarded the St Mary's Stations as the turning point of his career.

The parish's quieter institutions thread through the surrounding streets: the buildings at 1 and 2 Holly Walk belonged in the nineteenth century to St Vincent's Convent and Orphanage, which later expanded into the present presbytery, and the Sisters of St Dorothy still organise catechism classes for parish children. Music thrives, with a Bishop & Son two-manual organ and a choir singing seasonal music, psalms and Taizé chants — visitors are welcome to join them in the loft. Mass is celebrated through the week and four times each Sunday, and the church stands open to visitors most weekdays: a little piece of émigré France, two centuries old, at the heart of Hampstead village.