St. Mary's Church, Putney

The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Putney, stands beside the River Thames at the southern end of Putney Bridge in south-west London — an Anglican church of medieval origin that holds a unique place in the history of democracy, for it was here, in 1647, that the Putney Debates were held, when the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army argued over nothing less than the right of every man to a voice in how he is governed. A Grade II* listed building and a living parish church in the Diocese of Southwark, St Mary's has been a centre of Christian worship since at least the thirteenth century, and across the centuries it has gathered to itself a remarkable cast of English history — Thomas Cromwell, a Tudor bishop, Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens — but it is for one extraordinary debate that it is chiefly remembered.

There has been a church on this riverside site, beside the ancient ferry crossing of the Thames, since the 1200s, and parts of the medieval church survive within the present building. The fifteenth-century tower still stands, some of the nave arcading is medieval, and so does the early sixteenth-century Bishop West Chapel, built by Bishop Nicholas West — born at Putney around 1461, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a bishop and diplomat who raised two chantry chapels, one here in his home parish and another in Ely Cathedral, where he lies buried. Most of the body of the church, however, dates from a substantial reconstruction of 1836 to the designs of Edward Lapidge, who largely rebuilt it in yellow brick with stone dressings and Perpendicular windows, retaining some of the medieval pillars and arches in the nave and widening the north and south arcades. In 1973 much of the church was gutted by fire, and rebuilding was not completed until nearly a decade later, when St Mary's was re-hallowed by the Bishop of Woolwich on 6 February 1982. The restoration, by the architect Ronald Sims, took the unusual step of placing the altar not in the chancel or at the east end of the nave but halfway down its northern side, with the seating arranged to face it — a strikingly modern reordering of an ancient church. The pipe organ is by the Danish firm of Marcussen & Søn, and in 2005 a new extension, the Brewer Building, was opened at a cost of £1.7 million.

The event that made St Mary's famous unfolded in the autumn of 1647. The first Civil War had ended in the defeat of King Charles I, and the victorious New Model Army — radicalised, unpaid and increasingly political — gathered to debate the future constitution of England. From late October the General Council of the Army met in St Mary's Church, Putney, with the army's grandees, including Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, ranged against the more radical Agitators and the civilian Levellers, who had set out their demands in a manifesto called the Agreement of the People. What was argued at Putney was genuinely revolutionary: whether sovereignty rested with the people, whether the franchise should be extended far beyond the narrow propertied class who then held it, and what rights every Englishman possessed simply by being born. The most celebrated words of the debates were spoken by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, and they are now inscribed on a wall of the church: "For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government." It is one of the foundational utterances of democratic thought in the English language, spoken in a parish church by the Thames more than two centuries before the vote was extended to ordinary men — and it was heard, and recorded, at St Mary's, Putney.

The church's connections to English history run far beyond the debates. Thomas Cromwell — the blacksmith's son who rose to be Henry VIII's chief minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the architect of the English Reformation, and one of the most consequential statesmen in the nation's history — was born in Putney, in the parish of St Mary's. Samuel Pepys mentions the church in his diary for 1667, recording that he attended a service, heard "a good sermon", and cast an eye over the girls of the local school, "few of which were pretty" — a characteristically candid Pepysian aside. Charles Dickens made St Mary's the setting for the marriage of David Copperfield to Dora Spenlow in his most autobiographical novel. And in our own time the Anglican priest and broadcaster Giles Fraser, Team Rector of St Mary's from 2000 to 2009, campaigned to raise the profile of the Putney Debates, which are now commemorated each year and have given the church a renewed identity as a birthplace of democratic ideas.

St Mary's setting is one of the most attractive in riverside London. The church stands at the foot of Putney Bridge, beside the Thames at the start of the Championship Course used by the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, which sets off each year from just beside the church; the towpath, the rowing clubs and the open expanse of Putney and Barnes complete a scene that draws walkers, scullers and visitors alike. The church is one of the two in the Parish of Putney — the other being All Saints' on Putney Common — within the Wandsworth Deanery and the Kingston Episcopal Area of the Diocese of Southwark.

From a medieval riverside church by the Thames ferry, through a Tudor bishop's chapel and Thomas Cromwell's birth parish, to the army council that debated the rights of "the poorest he" in 1647, and on through fire, restoration and a modern reordering, St Mary's, Putney holds an outsized place in the national story. It is at once a working Anglican parish church and a monument to one of the great moments in the history of English liberty — the place where, in the words still inscribed on its wall, it was first argued in plain English that every man who lives under a government ought to have a say in it.