St Paul's and St George's Church

St Paul's and St George's Church — known affectionately across Edinburgh as "Ps and Gs" — is an evangelical church of the Scottish Episcopal Church standing on the corner of Broughton Street and York Place at the east end of Edinburgh's New Town. A category A listed building, it is one of the few Gothic Revival structures in a quarter dominated by Georgian neoclassicism: a Perpendicular vision modelled on King's College Chapel, Cambridge, rising amid the orderly terraces of the Athens of the North.

The congregation's story begins long before the building. In eighteenth-century Edinburgh, Episcopalians met for worship in small chapels around the city — three Non-Juror chapels and three Qualified chapels. On 18 August 1708, George Haliburton, Bishop of Aberdeen, licensed Robert Blair to be the first Episcopalian priest of a new congregation that began life meeting in a room in Half Moon Close on the Castle Hill, at a rent of £6 a year. Its founder was John Smith, a barrister who had come to Scotland after the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 to serve as Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer of Scotland. The church was later made collegiate, and as the congregation grew Smith built a permanent home: the New Chapel, opened in 1722 near the foot of Blackfriars Wynd in the Cowgate, enlarged in 1745 by purchase of the adjoining building. In 1774 the congregation moved again, to a newly built church at the east end of the Cowgate — now St Patrick's Roman Catholic church. But soon the well-to-do members began leaving the Old Town for the townhouses of the emerging New Town, and another move beckoned. St Paul's and St John's congregations considered uniting to build one large church on The Mound, but decided instead on two chapels — St John's at the west end of Princes Street, and St Paul's at the east end of the New Town.

The present building was erected between 1816 and 1818 to the designs of the Scottish architect Archibald Elliot, and consecrated as St Paul's Chapel on 30 January 1818. Elliot based his plans on King's College Chapel, Cambridge, designing in the Perpendicular style on a nave-and-aisle plan, complete with crocketed pinnacles, buttresses, and four octagonal corner turrets inspired by those of St Mary's Church at Beverley in Yorkshire; the sandstone exterior is richly decorated with Gothic strapwork beneath a crenellated parapet. The £12,000 cost was raised by voluntary subscription. The first rectors were the clergyman and essayist Archibald Alison and Robert Morehead, and the congregation included Walter Scott's family — their pew can now be seen in the side chapel of St Mary's Cathedral in Palmerston Place. The site had previously held small buildings backing onto Brown's Coachyard, for years Edinburgh's main coach station; the wall at the back of the church is the original wall behind which the horses and coaches were prepared, a trade that withered with the coming of the railways. At the north-east corner stands a bell tower with a single bell, moved there in 1818 — originally one of a peal of three bought for the coronation of Charles I at Holyrood Abbey in 1633; it is still operational, though no longer used. Inside, the long nave is flanked by tall aisles on arched stone columns; the north wall carries a stone tabernacle topped by a Gothic ogee arch designed by David Bryce, and there are marble monuments by the Scottish sculptors Sir John Steell and David Watson Stevenson. The east window is by Francis Eginton of Birmingham.

In 1891–92 Peddie and Kinnear enlarged the chapel into a church, building the chancel that extended the building eastwards, turning the original chancel into a choir, adding a rib-vaulted south-east porch, installing new furnishings, removing the aisle galleries, and moving the entrance further west along York Place to where the red door now stands. In 1932 the congregation merged with that of St George's — the Episcopalian chapel built on York Place in 1794 by James Adam — and the building was renamed St Paul's and St George's Church; old St George's closed and is now a casino. The amalgamation brought further changes: the balconies came down, staircases were removed, and the organ moved from the west end to its present position. A new pulpit, rood screen and reredos were commissioned from John Dick Peddie and David Forbes Smith, the reredos beautifully portraying Christ with the little children, flanked by St Paul on the left and St Cuthbert on the right. A small chapel formed inside the old entrance was later dedicated to the fallen of the First World War; the great west window — originally at the east end — was rebuilt into the west end, and new east and chancel windows introduced depicting early Celtic saints, mostly associated with this corner of Scotland, while a small stained glass window from the old Cowgate Chapel survives in the vestry. The organ itself is a thread through the congregation's whole history: built by John Snetzler for the Cowgate Chapel, rebuilt in the York Place building by J. Bruce in 1818, and enlarged by Harrison & Harrison in 1906 after several refurbishments.

By the later twentieth century the congregation had dwindled, and in 1985 the Bishop of Edinburgh, Alastair Haggart, installed the Reverend Roger Simpson as rector, with members of the Evangelical Episcopal Church of St Thomas in Corstorphine joining the York Place church. Within ten years the congregation had grown dramatically under the new, more evangelical churchmanship — a transformation that ultimately demanded more space. In the early twenty-first century, Lee Boyd architects renovated the church: new glass-fronted aisle galleries reinstated the balconies removed in the 1890s and doubled the church's capacity, a steel and glass entrance pavilion rose outside the west door, and the church hall was demolished and replaced. The £5.6 million project, completed in 2008, was named Building of the Year in the 2009 Edinburgh Architectural Association Awards. Three centuries after a room in Half Moon Close, the rectors' line — from Archibald Alison through Thomas Veitch (1956–84), Roger Simpson and Michael Maudsley to David Richards — continues, and "Ps and Gs" thrives as one of Scotland's largest and liveliest Episcopal congregations.