St Paul's Church

St Paul's is a large and handsome Anglican church on Queen Caroline Street in Hammersmith, west London, standing beside the Hammersmith flyover a short walk from the Underground station. A Grade II* listed building, it is the parish church of Hammersmith, with origins in the seventeenth century but rebuilt on a grand scale in the Victorian age, and today it is a thriving evangelical church within the Holy Trinity Brompton network.

The church's story begins as a chapel of ease. Hammersmith was originally a riverside hamlet within the great parish of Fulham, whose parish church was All Saints, and as the population grew the journey to Fulham — "the length and foulness of the way... in winter most toilsome, sometimes over ploughed lands, and almost unpassable" — became intolerable. In December 1629 the inhabitants of Hammersmith, led by the wealthy merchant Sir Nicholas Crispe, petitioned William Laud, Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury, for a chapel of their own. Laud granted the request, on condition that the rights of the mother church at Fulham were preserved, and the chapel was built largely by subscription, Sir Nicholas Crispe supplying £700 and the bricks. The Chapel of St Paul and its cemetery were consecrated by Bishop Laud on 7 June 1631.

The old chapel gathered some remarkable monuments. The 1st Earl of Mulgrave was buried here in 1646 in a black-and-white marble tomb, and in 1665 Sir Nicholas Crispe himself was laid to rest beneath a monument bearing a bronze bust of King Charles I — a "grateful commemoration of that glorious martyr" — beneath which, in a separate urn, Crispe's own heart was entombed, in token of his loyalty to the Crown during the Civil War. These memorials, treasured relics of the seventeenth century, were preserved when the church was later rebuilt.

In 1834 Hammersmith became a distinct parish with St Paul's as its parish church. As the district grew rapidly with the coming of the railways, the old chapel was felt to be too small and, as one contemporary put it, "not worthy of being the chief witness to God in the midst of such an important Metropolitan Suburb". At a public meeting in 1880 the decision was taken to rebuild the church on the same site, and between 1882 and 1891 the present church was built by the Chamberlen Brothers to the designs of the architects J. P. Seddon and H. R. Gough. The foundation stone was laid in 1882 by the Duke of Albany, and the nave was consecrated in 1883.

Built in the Early English Gothic style, with lancet windows, powerful buttresses, a high roof and an imposing tower, St Paul's is a building of real grandeur, designed to seat some 1,400 worshippers. Its walls are of brown Ancaster stone, with clustered columns of Belgian marble and arches of white and blue Bath stone across its six bays. Among its treasures are a pulpit brought from the demolished City church of All Hallows the Great, and stained glass by the celebrated firm of Clayton and Bell — the windows of the north side depicting the life of St Paul and those of the south the life of St Peter, the two apostles traditionally paired together. In the chancel hang two great ceiling-height paintings by the artist Charlie Mackesy, of the Crucifixion and the Prodigal Son.

Like its neighbour St Peter's, St Paul's lost a significant part of its land, including graves, when the Hammersmith flyover and the Great West Road were built between 1957 and 1961. In 1983 its pews were replaced with flexible seating, and in the 2000s a major restoration was carried out and a new hall and kitchen added at the west end, opened in 2011, fitting the historic building for a new era of growth. As part of the Holy Trinity Brompton network, St Paul's today is a large and lively church with a strong contemporary and evangelical character.

From its seventeenth-century origins as a chapel of ease granted by Archbishop Laud, through its Civil War monuments and its grand Victorian rebuilding, to its vibrant life today, St Paul's, Hammersmith, gathers nearly four centuries of west London's history into one striking church — a building that has grown and adapted with its community while preserving the memorials and treasures of its long past.