St Mary's Church

St Mary's Church, Rotherhithe, stands in narrow St Marychurch Street close beside the Thames in south-east London, surrounded by former warehouses and facing the charity school house of 1703 — a Georgian church of 1714–15 on a site where Christians have worshipped for at least seven and a half centuries, and the burial place of Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower. Few churches in London carry so much of the river's history.

Documentary evidence shows a church here since at least 1282, and Roman bricks found when the tower was underpinned in 1913 suggest still earlier buildings. The medieval church was served by priests from Bermondsey Abbey, and after Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1538, its vestments, silver, gold plate and other gifts were sold off to fund repairs. Fragments of that medieval building survive: stone blocks incorporated into the walls beside the organ, and in the crypt, old walls of chalk and flint with later Tudor brickwork. A drawing of 1623 — perspective shaky, but unique — is the only surviving record of its appearance, along with a few salvaged memorials.

By the early eighteenth century the riverside site had nearly doomed the church. In 1710 the parishioners petitioned Parliament for a rebuilding grant, pleading that their church, "standing very low and near the banks of the Thames, is often overflowed, whereby the foundation of the church and tower is rotted and in great danger of falling". The petition failed — so Rotherhithe rebuilt its own church, by subscription and by the labour of its many local craftsmen. The new church rose in 1714–15 to the design of John James, a major architect of the day and associate of Sir Christopher Wren; money ran short, and the tower was only completed in 1747 by Lancelot Dowbiggin, a City joiner and surveyor, perhaps to his own design within James's general plan. The exterior has remained almost unchanged ever since, though the interior was much altered in 1876.

The church's maritime associations are its glory. A memorial marks the final resting place of Christopher Jones, the Rotherhithe mariner who captained the Mayflower on her 1620 voyage carrying the Pilgrim Fathers to North America — the church is justly proud of the connection, and Rotherhithe was the Mayflower's home port. When the famous warship Temeraire — whose last journey to the breaker's yard at Deptford Turner immortalised in The Fighting Temeraire — was broken up in 1838, some of her timbers were made into the communion table now in the Lady Chapel and two bishop's chairs. The church is also the burial place of Prince Lee Boo of Palau, the Pacific island prince who came to England in the 1780s and captured Georgian hearts, and of Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Teddeman (c.1620–1668), who fought in the Dutch wars. Fittingly, some of London's Nordic seamen's churches and missions stand nearby.

The church holds one curiosity of marriage law: in 1760 the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton — the future partner of James Watt — married his second wife Anne here, the pair having journeyed far from home because she was his first wife's sister, a match forbidden by canon law but not void if no one objected when the banns were read. In distant Rotherhithe, no one objected.

St Mary's possesses a fine pipe organ of 1764 by John Byfield II, which despite alterations retains much of its original character and its magnificent case — one of the celebrated Georgian organs of London. The bells were restored and re-hung between 1996 and 1999, with essential repairs to the spire, and are regularly rung by members of the Docklands Ringing Centre.

The church stands in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England; as the parish is unable to accept the ordination of women, it receives alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Fulham. Within the Diocese of Southwark, St Mary's remains a living, working church supported by local people — the sailors' church of Rotherhithe, where the Mayflower's captain sleeps a few yards from the river he sailed.