St Matthew, Bethnal Green

St Matthew's, Bethnal Green, is an eighteenth-century Anglican church in the East End of London, in the Diocese of London and the Borough of Tower Hamlets. A Grade II* listed building admired above all for its dignified Classical exterior, it has survived fire, the Blitz and a turbulent recent history to remain a working parish church at the heart of Bethnal Green — a building whose story reaches from the Georgian city through the great Christian Socialist movement of the Victorian East End to a place in the folklore of twentieth-century London.

The church was built between 1743 and 1746 to a Classical design by George Dance the Elder, with a tower rising at the centre of the west front above a pedimented, slightly projecting central bay. It was not the first scheme for the site: the great Nicholas Hawksmoor had drawn up a plan under the 1711 Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, but, like most of that ambitious programme, it never came to fruition. Dance's church has twice been gutted and twice rebuilt. A fire in 1859 destroyed the interior — though the registers and church plate were saved — and it was rebuilt in 1861 by Thomas Knightley, who added a cupola to the tower. Then, on the first night of the Blitz in 1940, the roof and interior were destroyed by enemy bombing. A temporary church was created within the bombed shell in 1954, and between 1958 and 1961 the church was properly rebuilt by Anthony Lewis of Michael Tapper & Lewis, who gave it what its listing calls a "bold post-war interior".

That post-war interior is a gallery of mid-twentieth-century ecclesiastical art, drawing on a roll-call of distinguished artists: an upper Lady Chapel with panelling of the apostles by Peter Snow; a bas-relief of St Michael and the angels battling the Devil by Kim James; wall paintings by Barry Robinson; sand-blasted glass doors by Heather Child; carved altar panels by Robert Dawson; a vesica-shaped marble font by Anthony Lewis himself; and fired ceramic Stations of the Cross by Donald Potter. The church was reconsecrated by the Bishop of London in 1961. Its ring of eight bells was cast in 1861, after the fire, by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and the railings, churchyard walls and the parish watch house of 1826 are separately listed.

The parish's history reflects the changing fortunes of the Church in the East End. For much of the eighteenth century the rectors were absentees — one, William Loxham, rector for forty-three years, is not recorded as ever having visited the parish — leaving the work to poorly paid curates. The nineteenth century brought a very different spirit. Septimus Hansard, rector from 1864, was a Christian Socialist and friend of F. D. Maurice who, with Edward Pusey, tended cholera victims in 1866 and introduced a daily Eucharist. His most famous curate was Stewart Headlam, who founded the Guild of St Matthew here in 1877; Headlam's radical socialism was so controversial that he was never given a parish of his own and for fourteen years was even refused a licence to officiate. Another rector, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, who came from the Oxford House settlement, went on to become Bishop of London. Until the mid-nineteenth century the living was in the gift of Brasenose College, Oxford, and the rectors were Brasenose men.

The church's modern history has been eventful. The churchyard, closed to burials in the 1850s, was laid out as a public garden in 1896 by the pioneering landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson for the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. In the 1990s, after the Church of England voted to ordain women as priests, the then rector converted to Roman Catholicism and for a time held both Catholic and Anglican services in the church, before departing with about two-thirds of the congregation. Those who remained worked to stabilise the parish, and the church continues today under its present rectors. St Matthew's also holds a curious place in London popular memory as the church where the funerals of the notorious gangsters the Kray twins were held, in 1995 and 2000.

From its building by George Dance the Elder in Georgian London, through its repeated destruction and rebuilding, the Christian Socialism of Hansard and Headlam, and its survival of the Blitz, St Matthew's, Bethnal Green, remains a remarkable witness to the long religious life of the East End — a fine Classical church, rebuilt with bold modern art, still serving its community after nearly three centuries.