St Mary the Virgin, East Barnet

St Mary the Virgin is the Church of England parish church of East Barnet, standing on Church Hill in the London Borough of Barnet within the Diocese of St Albans. A Grade II* listed building, it is one of the oldest churches in the London area: although most of what stands today is nineteenth-century work, the north wall survives from the very first church of 1080, making St Mary's a place of Christian worship for more than nine centuries.

The church began as a small chapel on the hill, built in 1080 and dedicated to St Mary the Virgin. The Abbot of St Albans consecrated it and became both its patron and rector until the Reformation, after which the rector was appointed by the reigning monarch — a practice that continues to this day. The first chapel had thick walls of compressed rubble, lime and plaster with stone around the openings, and windows without glass; much of the north wall and probably the frame of the south door survive from that period, and the chapel may have had an apse. The church at Chipping Barnet was almost certainly founded in the mid-thirteenth century as a chapel-of-ease to St Mary's, and had certainly been built by Michaelmas 1276, though Chipping Barnet would not become a separate parish for another six hundred years. By the thirteenth century glass had been put in St Mary's windows, some of which survives, and in the fifteenth century the apse was replaced by a larger chancel with a protecting porch.

Most of the present church dates from the nineteenth century. In 1805 a churchwarden raised the walls by four feet and built a new roof over the old, and a wooden turret of 1794 holding three small bells gave way first to an octagonal belfry and then, in 1828, to a yellow-brick Neo-Norman tower. Standing apart from the church by the width of the old porch, the tower was not universally admired — it was said at the time to have "absorbed the larger part of subscriptions destined to the general improvement of the edifice" — but, only fifty feet high yet set on the hilltop, it can be seen from a great distance, often flying a flag. In 1849 G. E. Street, later the architect of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, made minor alterations and uncovered a medieval piscina and patterned wall paintings. As the neighbouring Church Farm School filled the choir with boys, the church was extended in 1868 with a new south aisle, the south wall being demolished and replaced by arches, the historic box pews swept away in favour of choir stalls and pews, and a doorway pierced into the tower. The lychgate was erected in 1872, and the chancel was lengthened by twelve feet in 1880, gaining a new east window of the Annunciation and a doubled set of choir stalls. The present organ was installed in 1920, and the church suffered damage in the Second World War that required much of the roof and some walls to be repaired.

The building wears its long history with feeling. Entry is through the lychgate, rebuilt in 1991, which bears the legend "Both High and Low, Rich and Poor together," and in the south-west corner of the churchyard grows a young yew taken as a cutting from the Eastling Yew in Kent — believed to have been alive at the time of Christ's birth — planted in 2000 to mark the third Christian millennium. Inside, above the doors, hangs a crucifix made by the Wild Goose Studio in Kinsale, a replica of a twelfth-century Byzantine "Christus Rex" showing Christ crowned and enthroned on the cross, a reminder of the church's Benedictine roots; a niche in the ancient north wall usually holds a statue of St Benedict. The north wall itself, painted white and floodlit at night, is the oldest part of the church and all that remains of the stone building of 1080, its rubble and lime plaster bearing a tablet recording its wartime damage and restoration.

The chancel, built around 1400 and enlarged in 1632 at the instigation of Sir Robert Berkeley, was opened up in 2000 when its heavy Victorian choir stalls were removed, and now carries a wrought-iron corona of three intertwined crowns — of thorns, of life and of victory — symbolising the kingship of Christ. The 1880 east window tells the story of the Annunciation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, with the Virgin in her blue robe appearing in every scene, while the south aisle window commemorates the parishioners who fell in the Second World War. Among those buried here are Major General Sir George Prevost, Governor of Canada from 1811 to 1815, and Sir William Richmond Cotton, Lord Mayor of London in 1875 — fitting company for the ancient hilltop church of East Barnet.