St Stephen's Church

St Stephen's Church on Castlebar Hill in Ealing, west London, has occupied three buildings in its century and a half of life — an iron mission hut, a grand Victorian stone church that still dominates its neighbourhood as converted flats, and the modern church centre where the congregation worships today. Together they tell the story of suburban London's growth, decline and reinvention.

The parish of Christ Church was created in Ealing in 1853 to serve a population swelling after the railway station opened in 1838. As growth continued, the vicar, Stephen Hilliard, established a mission on Castlebar Hill to the north-west, where the developer Henry de Bruno Austin was laying out large houses. The first St Stephen's was an "iron church" — prefabricated from corrugated iron for speed — which opened on Wednesday 12 June 1867 with a sermon from Robert Bickersteth, Bishop of Ripon. A parochial school opened the same year in a stable in Castlebar Mews, moving to purpose-built rooms on Albert Road in 1882; by 1910 it taught 209 pupils, before its children transferred to council schools and the buildings closed as a school in 1934.

The permanent church followed in 1876: a substantial Victorian Gothic building of ragstone with ashlar dressings under a slate roof, costing £6,000 and consecrated on 3 June 1876 by the Bishop of London. Sir Arthur Blomfield designed the tall steeple added in 1891. The church flourished mightily — 570 worshippers were counted at morning service in 1903, with another 300 in the evening — and in 1907 the vicar, Dr Tupholme, planted a daughter mission, St Barnabas', at the foot of the hill in Pitshanger: first another iron church seating 250, then a brick church seating a thousand, completed in 1916, whose planning meeting (chaired by Henry Vivian of Brentham Garden Suburb) agreed restrictions on bell-ringing. St Barnabas became a separate parish.

St Stephen's own bells have a story worthy of an Ealing comedy. Eight were cast by Mears & Stainbank at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1911 and blessed in 1912, and a keen team of ringers established a regular forty-minute Sunday peal. When the Ancient Society of College Youths rang a two-hour Saturday peal in 1921, the complaints flew — "Why do they have this tremendous bell ringing? ... what might almost be termed cruelty" — and a parish meeting under the Reverend Maynard ruled that the bells be rung only on alternate Sundays. When the building was declared unsafe in 1979 the bells were removed to a Docklands warehouse, mooted as replacements for the swaying bells of St Mary's Rotherhithe; instead, restored by Eayre & Smith in 1987, they were installed in St Machar's Cathedral, Aberdeen — making it one of the few churches in Scotland with a ring designed for change ringing.

Subsidence ended the stone church's working life: it was deconsecrated in 1979 and converted into flats as St Stephen's Court. Yet it remains the landmark of its district, Grade II listed, standing on an island site at the head of The Avenue — a broad, straight, plane-lined road that climbs the hill toward it in grand processional style. The church gives its name to the St Stephen's Conservation Area, whose Edwardian streets were oriented around it; the borough's conservation assessment calls the former church "the landmark dominating the skyline and streetscape, the focal point along all the roads in and around the conservation area".

The congregation, meanwhile, never left the hill. It continued meeting in the church hall to the south-east, and that site was redeveloped into the third St Stephen's — a lower complex in modern red brick with slate roofs, dedicated in 1987 as St Stephen's Church Centre. Today it holds daily weekday morning services, and Sundays pair a traditional Common Worship service with a more informal contemporary one after refreshments, alongside Alpha courses, a summer fête, afternoon teas and the Shining Stars group for young children — a Victorian mission still serving its hill, in its third home.