St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick

St Nicholas Church stands on Church Street in Old Chiswick, a few steps from the River Thames, on a site where Christians have worshipped since at least 1181. The village of Old Chiswick grew up around the church from that Norman-era beginning, and the dedication to St Nicholas — patron saint of sailors and fishermen — speaks of the riverside parish's original livelihood. Today the church is Grade II* listed, an Anglican parish church whose churchyard holds one of the most remarkable gatherings of famous dead anywhere in London.

The medieval church is unusually well documented. At "the unusually early date of 1252" a senior cleric formally visited Chiswick and made an inventory — Ornamenta inventa apud Chesewith, "ornaments found at Chiswick", on the feast of Saints John and Paul. The list is a vivid snapshot of a thirteenth-century parish's equipment: a good missal sent from the treasury of St Paul's, two graduals, a badly bound tropary, an old lectionary, an anthem book and a psalter; a small silver chalice, a red velvet chasuble, vestments, corporals, five altar cloths, an arras cloth, an old chrismatory, candlesticks of brass and tin, and a font without a lock. The chancel roof needed repair — and, curiously, the church was at that date not yet formally dedicated. Further visitations followed in 1297 and 1458. The west tower, which still stands, was built between 1416 and 1435 for the vicar William Bordall.

The rest of the medieval church served until the Victorian era, when between 1882 and 1884 everything but the tower was demolished and rebuilt to designs by John Loughborough Pearson, one of the great church architects of the age. The Duke of Devonshire — whose family seat of Chiswick House lay nearby — gave £1,000, but the bulk of the cost was met by Henry Smith of Fuller, Smith & Turner, the Griffin Brewery that still brews beside the church. Constrained by the short distance between tower and street, Pearson made the nave short but wide, nearly square in plan, built of squared Kentish ragstone in the Perpendicular style beneath a copper roof. Inside, the tall fifteenth-century tower arch and the hood-mould over the west window survive from the medieval church.

The church's memorials span English history. Mary Cromwell, Countess Fauconberg, daughter of Oliver Cromwell, was buried in the church on 24 March 1713 — local legend has long whispered that her father's remains lie secretly near her. Inside are monuments to Sir Thomas Chaloner (died 1615) and his wives, kneeling beneath stone curtains held open by carved figures; to Charlotte Seymour, Duchess of Somerset (died 1773); to Thomas Bentley (died 1780), Josiah Wedgwood's business partner, with a sarcophagus carved by Thomas Scheemakers; and to the actor Charles Holland (died 1769), whose bust on an obelisk carries an epitaph by David Garrick. In more recent memory, Major Bernard Montgomery — the future Field Marshal and 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein — married Betty Carver here on 27 July 1927.

It is the churchyard, though, that draws pilgrims of art and history. Near the church stands the tomb of William Hogarth (died 1764), the painter and satirist whose house survives a short walk away, his epitaph a poem by his friend Garrick. By the wall is the classical bronze tomb of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (died 1903), painter of the Thames he could see from Chiswick. The landscape painter Philip James de Loutherbourg (died 1812) rests in a mausoleum designed by Sir John Soane. The monument to Ugo Foscolo, the great Italian poet and patriot who died in exile at Turnham Green in 1827, remains even though his remains were translated to Santa Croce in Florence in 1871; the Italian government added inscriptions to the Chiswick monument as part of its glorification of the newly united nation. Here too lie Frederick Hitch (died 1913), awarded the Victoria Cross for his heroism at Rorke's Drift; Henry Joy (died 1893), a trumpeter of the Charge of the Light Brigade; Richard Wright, bricklayer to Lord Burlington of Chiswick House; and the Liberal politician Sir Percy Harris, whose Grade II* listed monument carries a resurrection relief by Edward Bainbridge Copnall. An early English foliated cross grave-marker, name long lost, stands in the porch as a reminder of the unrecorded generations beneath.

Still an active parish church in the Diocese of London, St Nicholas anchors the conservation area of Old Chiswick — its tower, brewery and riverside lanes a surviving fragment of the Thames-side village from which modern Chiswick grew.