St Mary's Church, Twickenham

St Mary's Church, Twickenham — St Mary the Virgin — is a Grade II* listed Church of England parish church on Church Street in Twickenham, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, standing a short distance from York House on the banks of the Thames, immediately opposite Eel Pie Island. It is the burial place of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the Augustan age, who lies beneath a slab marked simply "P" — and the church itself was rebuilt in his lifetime after one of the most providentially foretold collapses in English church history.

The church stands on the site of an earlier one, incorporating its fifteenth-century medieval tower. On 9 April 1713 the ancient fourteenth-century nave collapsed — an event that had been strangely foreseen. A new vicar, Dr Pratt, had insisted on erecting a tabernacle in the churchyard before the collapse, and a local resident, Lady Wentworth, wrote a month afterwards: "Soe he preached there and exhorted al to giv thanks for thear great deleverenc for the church not falling when they wear in it, it being then standing. The people all laughed at him, and in a weeks time it fell to the ground, soe all the parish contrebutse to the building of it." The painter Sir Godfrey Kneller — the leading portraitist of the age, and then a churchwarden of St Mary's — was active in the plans for reconstruction, carried out in the Neoclassical style by the local architect John James in 1713–14. The result is one of the most charming hybrids on the Thames: the medieval ragstone tower joined to an eighteenth-century nave of red brick with Tuscan pilasters and pediments, enlarged in 1754, with fittings of the period including the reredos and gallery fronts. The tower carries a ring of eight bells — one from the early sixteenth century, three from the seventeenth and four from the eighteenth. Kneller himself died in 1723 and was entombed in the church he had helped rebuild.

Monuments survived from the medieval nave, including a brass of 1443 to Richard Burton, the King's chief cook, and his wife Agnes. The later monuments form a sculpture gallery of the Georgian age: Admiral of the Fleet Sir Chaloner Ogle (died 1750) by John Michael Rysbrack; Nathaniel Pigott (died 1737) by Peter Scheemakers; George Gostlin (died 1782) and his wife Anne by John Bacon Junior; Lady Margaret Wildman (died 1825) by Sir Richard Westmacott; and Alexander Pope's memorial of 1761 by Prince Hoare of Bath. Pope himself — Twickenham's most famous resident, whose villa and grotto stood along the riverbank — was buried in the church in 1744 beside his mother Edith, who had preceded him in 1733; his grave lies under the stone slab engraved with its single letter P, near a bronze memorial plate.

The registers and vaults read like a chronicle of empire and the stage. On 20 June 1721 Dr Pratt baptised "James Shandayes and John Twogood", described as two Indian princes; Henry Fielding's son William was baptised here in 1747, and Hallam Tennyson — son of the poet laureate and later second Governor-General of Australia — in 1852. In the crypt lies Sir William Berkeley (1605–1677), Governor of Virginia for nearly three decades, laid to rest in 1677 not in a coffin but encased in "lead exactly fitted to the shape of the body, shewing the form of the features, hands, feet, and even nails"; a year later he was joined by his brother Lord Berkeley, one of the Lords Proprietor of New Jersey — the two colonial grandees commemorated by a memorial window beneath which the ancient crypt survives. The churchyard holds the actress and soprano Kitty Clive (1711–1785), Garrick's great comic partner, with a plaque on the chancel's outside wall; General William Tryon (1729–1788), governor of North Carolina and New York; General William Howe (1729–1814), Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America during the War of Independence; the tea merchant Thomas Twining (1675–1741), founder of the dynasty, with a memorial at the north-east corner; Martha Bruce, Countess of Elgin and Kincardine, former governess of Princess Charlotte, buried in 1810; and Bridget Markham and Cecily Bulstrode, ladies-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark, who both died at Twickenham Park in 1609. Charlotte Boscawen Moore, Countess of Drogheda, who "dy'd April the 3d 1735 in the 32d Year of her Age", lies in the nave. In more recent memory, the funeral of Neil Aspinall — head of The Beatles' Apple Corps and sometimes called "the fifth Beatle" — took place at the church in 2008.

Like its ancient predecessor, the present church began as the parish church of the whole of Twickenham, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century housing growth carved out new parishes for Holy Trinity (1842), St Philip and St James, Whitton (1862), St Stephen's (1875), All Saints (1914) and All Hallows (1939) — leaving St Mary's with a smaller parish that still takes in most of central Twickenham. The church even has its place in art: it features in Osmund Caine's painting Wedding at Twickenham Parish Church (1948), in the borough's art collection. Tower of the Middle Ages, nave of the Enlightenment, Pope beneath the floor and the Thames at the gate — St Mary's remains the riverside heart of Twickenham, as it has been for at least six centuries.