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    The historic naval church that is in shipshape condition again

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    Sheerness is on the north-eastern tip of the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. For almost 300 years it was a Royal Naval Dockyard. In 1960 the Royal Navy sold the dockyard and it became a commercial port. Since then it has carried on business behind the original high brick wall; some Georgian terraces and, between them, a handsome tower belonging to the former Dockyard Church, are the only clues to the site’s illustrious past. With little hope of success, an unflagging group set about rescuing the church for the use of people in Sheppey and north Kent. But against all expectations, in the last week of July, the Sheerness Dockyard Trust handed over the restored building to its new users, a co-working enterprise called Island Works. ‘Our building is now theirs,’ the Trust’s chairman Will Palin told me with a hint of pride.
    The church was designed and built between 1823 and 1828 by George Ledwell Taylor, surveyor to the Admiralty, as a proud ornament within the naval estate, but also to serve the wider town. Little more than 50 years later it was badly damaged in a fire. After repairs it remained in use as a parish church until 1973.
    After 1960, the new operators of the port sold or demolished many of the historic buildings that remained and attrition continued, with the Dockyard Church suffering another serious fire in 2001. Swale District Council purchased it – the structure still standing proud, but now like an open sore in the small town – in 2016 and ownership passed to the newly formed Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust.
    The transformation of that fire-blackened shell and tower is a triumph. Members of the Trust (all volunteers), brought their wide range of experience and contacts to the task but none more so than Palin, who oversaw the restoration of the Great Hall ceiling paintings at the Old Royal Naval College Greenwich and is now CEO of the Barts Heritage Trust.
    Column inches: the restoration by Hugh Broughton Architects and Martin Ashley Architects has preserved the original fabric wherever possible. Photo: Dirk Linder; courtesy Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust
    In Sheerness, restoration of the Dockyard Church is the work of Hugh Broughton Architects and Martin Ashley Architects. Their approach is happily light-touch, retaining traces of the past rather than trying to repair all the damage. Original fabric takes precedence so that even the ventilation grilles remain as found.
    The open hall is flooded with natural light, amplified by massive glazed ‘lanterns’ inserted within the new timber roof structure. A grid of decorative iron columns from the 1880s and a simple generous gallery are almost the only additions, apart from a few self-contained meeting rooms downstairs.
    Historic England funded the work on the tower, which included the reinstatement of the upper-level balustrade to gain a little more height. In 2019 the National Lottery Heritage Fund introduced a new ‘heritage enterprise’ category to support projects ‘that seek to achieve economic growth by investing in heritage’ – a description that couldn’t fit the Dockyard Church better. It was awarded £5.2m, while prodigious fund-raising efforts targeting trusts and foundations raised a further £3.2m.
    The church is now a new kind of co-working space, a sibling for an earlier venture in Canterbury, Fruitworks Coworking, which was set up by the Kent Foundation in 2011. In the soaring, inspiring spaces of the comfortably furnished building, which is bathed in natural light, local young people and new businesses can choose between short-term membership or longer commitment, on the model of a gym. Once there, everybody has access to advice and support from the Kent Foundation.
    Too big to flail: Great Dockyard Model from 1830 was made to a scale of 1:60 and measures 40 by 36 feet – shown here at the Boat Store in Sheerness in the 1960s. Courtesy Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust
    The transformation of the former church is very welcome in this economically and socially depressed corner of north-east Kent. Only one important hope remains unrealised: the repair and full display of the Great Dockyard Model of 1830. Owned by the Trust, three sections of the 1:60 scale model are displayed on the ground floor but the model must find another home in order to be shown in its entirety (40 by 36 feet). In a cruel irony, the Boat Store, a Grade I-listed structure of 1859 that once housed the model is now hidden and inaccessible behind the brick walls and security equipment of the current commercial operators, Peel Ports.
    Historic England regards the Boat Store as the earliest surviving example of a multi-storey iron-frame and panel structure in the country. Is it too much to hope that the positive developments next door will persuade the Boat Store’s reluctant owners to release it, allowing it to become the best possible home for the Great Dockyard Model, once again? More

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      in Photography

      How Carrie Mae Weems keeps making her presence felt

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      Halfway through Carrie Mae Weems’s exhibition at the Barbican the artist stands alone in a black frame. With both palms resting firmly on a kitchen table, she leans forward, gazing at the viewer with a knowing, defiant stare. This simple image is one of the highlights of the Kitchen Table Series (1990), which chronicles the experiences of a Black woman navigating love, motherhood and selfhood in a world where even the most intimate moments are political. It is also a rare moment in this survey spanning the last 30 years of her career where Weems looks directly at the audience.
      But the artist’s presence can be felt even when she cannot be seen, in the words that often accompany her photographs or the voiceovers that narrate her films. From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried (1995–96) is an early work featuring daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women from the archives of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Weems transforms these images that were originally used to promote polygenism (the theory that different races represented different species), tinting them red and superimposing words describing the experiences of those depicted: ‘Black and tanned your whipped wind of change howled low blowing itself – ha – smack into the middle of Ellington’s orchestra / Billie heard it too and cried strange fruit tears.’ Here, she fills in gaps in the archive, combining words and images to imagine a story for the figures within the frames.
      You Became A Scientific Profile; A Negroid Type; An Anthropological Debate; and & A Photographic Subject from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), Carrie Mae Weems. Photo: courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York/Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin; © Carrie Mae Weems
      Bearing witness to the African-American experience across the centuries is at the heart of Weems’s art, which blends documentary and staged imagery that at various points provoke, question and even, occasionally, comfort the viewer. A Land of Broken Dreams (2021), an installation that in the version at the Barbican recreates a living room from the Black Panther era, is dotted with photos of the movement’s most prominent activists. In the middle are viewfinders for the audience to pick up, which transport you to the slave sites of Gorée island (Senegal) and Elmina Castle (Ghana), among others, through grainy black-and-white photos. While wandering through this installation, I hear a voice leaking in from another room: ‘There’s a man, African-American, he’s got a bicycle helmet. He’s recording me and threatening me and my dog.’ These familiar words from the summer of 2020 – of a white woman calling the police on an African-American man bird-watching in Central Park – invade the space. It’s an ironic reminder of how racism relentlessly interrupts everyday life.
      Still from Cyclorama – The Shape of Things: A Video in 7 Parts (2021), Carrie Mae Weems. Photo: courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York/Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin; © Carrie Mae Weems
      It turns out that the voice is part of The Shape of Things, a 39-minute film presented on a panoramic curved screen. The film takes the viewer through seven acts, including segregation-era protest scenes, circus imagery interspersed with footage from the Capitol riot in 2021 and a scene of a woman surrounded by falling sheets of paper. The climax of the film offers some relief as rain-soaked figures caress their bodies in a trance-like state. Weems’s voice offers a weighty but somewhat elusive commentary to this loose collage. Despite her eloquence, it is not entirely clear what she is trying to say. Perhaps the film is deliberately ambiguous, or perhaps it is trying to say too much.
      The works Weems allows to speak for themselves are among the most powerful. At first glance, Painting the Town (2021) appears to be a series of abstract paintings in muted colours. The caption explains that these are in fact photographs of boarded-up storefronts, taken after demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, in Portland, Oregon, where the artist was born. The local authorities repeatedly painted over the protest graffiti scrawled across these walls and Weems was struck by the abstract quality these bruised buildings began to assume. Through careful use of lighting and cropping, her photographs turn them into fields of flat colour that evoke a sense of brokenness and erasure.
      Painting the Town #3 (2021), Carrie Mae Weems. Photo: courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York/Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin; © Carrie Mae Weems
      But Painting the Town looks beyond the immediate aftermath of the protests, to the lack of recognition for Black artists in the history of Abstract Expressionism. This theme of exclusion appears elsewhere in her work too. In the Museums series (2006–present), Weems pictures herself in a black robe in front of major institutions with her back to the camera. Here, she is not asking to be let in but rather questioning the dominance of spaces that were not built with her in mind. Deliberately placing herself outside but looking in, the series explores the artist’s relationship to art institutions themselves – a total inversion of the kitchen-table image where she is inside, looking out at us.
      Still, something about the Museums series feels a little too staged; the idea feels more compelling than the execution. We do not always need to see or hear Weems to feel the power of her gaze. The artist’s constant experimentation with language, moving images and photography is captivating, but this exhibition is most striking when Carrie Mae Weems draws us directly into what she sees.
      Untitled (Woman Standing Alone) from Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems. Photo: courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York/Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin; © Carrie Mae Weems
      ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now’ is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 3 November. More

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      in Architecture

      Genteel flats for genteel people

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      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
      In the 1760s the Adam brothers built a speculative housing development on an insalubrious patch of London between the Strand and the Thames. To appeal to punters, they used grand symmetry and pilasters to give the new terraces of the Adelphi the outward appearance of a single classical riverine palace. Financially, the scheme was a near-disaster, but the aesthetic ruse was a success. In the second half of the 19th century, with London’s booming middle classes needing places to live, and often reluctant to slog out to the new suburbs, builders again turned to the palace frontage. In 1852, as part of the creation of Victoria Street in Westminster, Henry Ashton designed a long Italianate six-storey block containing 36 large flats. With this, he created the London ‘mansion block’, a distinctive typology explored by Karin Templin in At Home in London: The Mansion Block, published in May by MACK and the Architecture Foundation. The mansion block prospered over the next half-century, and subsequently experienced two revivals: between the world wars, and from 2010 to the present day.
      It’s this latest revival that makes Templin’s survey more than a vintage snapshot. One of the three-pipe problems of British politics: everyone wants more housing built, but people are often very resistant to anything being built near them. Conservative policymakers have in recent years treated the problem as largely aesthetic, sweetening the pill of new housing by promising ‘building beautiful’, ‘placemaking’ and so on. Sometimes this verges on simple euphemism: a ‘garden suburb’ might stir up fewer angry residents’ associations than a ‘housing estate’. Similarly, ‘mansion block’ sounds a more urbane neighbour than ‘block of flats’.
      Which raises the question of whether it is truly a typology, or just a marketing gimmick to make apartment buildings more palatable to a suspicious public. Templin lays to rest some misconceptions about this. The Victorian Londoner was not as sceptical of apartment blocks as is generally assumed: the mansion block was widely advocated and welcomed. By 1911, more than 10 per cent of London’s population lived in flats. (These were generally rented, even for the upper-middle and upper classes: home ownership became a national obsession only later in the 20th century.)
      Speculative building led to some extraordinary heaps, such as Queen Anne’s Mansions beside St James’s Park, designed by Henry Alers Hankey and E.R. Robson and built between 1873 and 1889. This piled 300 flats on 13 teetering floors, connected by the capital’s first residential hydraulic passenger lift. The facade, a monotonous grid of barely adorned windows, was slightly inflected, adding to the sense that it loomed over the street below. It was demolished in 1973. But generally the Victorian mansion block was distinguished by architectural unity, visible in the handsome red brick and pale stone blocks built around the Albert Hall by R. Norman Shaw and others. It is these blocks that are such a characteristic part of Chelsea, Marylebone and Mayfair. The density of population they permit, and the shops and restaurants they often incorporate, have done much to make those neighbourhoods attractive, as Templin explores.
      Dolphin Square in Pimlico, London, designed by Gordon Jeeves (1888–1964) and built in 1937. Photo: Matthew Blunderfield; courtesy the artist and MACK; published in At Home in London: The Mansion Block by Karin Templin (MACK)
      The second age of the mansion block, after the end of the First World War, came in a very different style, as art deco and neoclassicism elbowed aside Edwardian fanciness, and often on a very different scale. Previous efforts were dwarfed by red brick megastructures such as Du Cane Court in Balham – 632 flats – and Dolphin Square in Pimlico, with 1,310 flats, for a time the largest residential building in Europe.
      These giant buildings were often meaner on the inside. Driven by modern ideas that stressed economy of space, and traditional housebuilders’ ideas about generosity of profit, the individual flats were shrinking. The interwar apartment block was the subject of satire. How to Live in a Flat (1936) is a collection of wonderful illustrations by Heath Robinson (glued together with a chatty text by K.R.G. Browne) showing the space-saving devices necessitated by a modern flat: dining tables that double as beds, baths that protrude out of the side of the building, and washing lines attached to hot-air balloons. Significantly, it is the middle classes who are under scrutiny, and made to look ridiculous for tolerating these innovations.
      A similar message comes from Osbert Lancaster’s Pillar to Post: The Pocket Lamp of Architecture (1938), which gave the world the typologies ‘Stockbroker’s Tudor’, ‘By-Pass Variegated’ and so on. ‘Park Land Residential’, a block for the wealthy, and ‘LCC Residential’, for the working classes, are two halves of the same joke: it’s the same building, but the version for the working classes is nicer as it’s not on a busy road, the rent is lower and it has trees outside rather than shops.
      These lampoons contributed to a sense that flats were good enough for the lower classes, and only the lower classes. After the Second World War, with modernist planning ascendant, apartment blocks were mostly designed without the street frontage characteristic of the mansion block. Floor plans were also regularised, partly as a result of the structural logic of the high-rise. In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator (2014), Andreas Bernard writes about the homogenising effect of elevators on building plans: since an elevator shaft appears in the same place on every floor, it governs the rest of the layout, and repetition naturally follows.
      An excellent feature of Templin’s book is its inclusion of floor plans, which help prove that there’s more to the mansion block than decorative twiddles and a better class of tenant. These plans are often fascinating, revealing great internal variety. This is partly dictated by the demands of a street frontage, and the deep bays, recesses and courtyards needed to give every room a window (so much easier when your block is a tower isolated in the middle of the site). And it’s a quality that lives in modern mansion blocks by architects including Peter Barber – the ultimate being the honeycomb interior of 79 Fitzjohns Avenue by Sergison Bates, completed last year.
      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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      in Architecture

      Can Helsinki’s modern architecture grow old gracefully?

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      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
      The Helsinki skyline is startlingly low for a capital city, its further horizons determined by water and scattered wooded islands. In the centre, urban civility and a clear-headed planning regime have established a height limit of around eight storeys, punctuated by occasional eminences. The standout is the heroic central station, designed in the early 1900s by Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero). Otherwise, only a few spires and the lofty white Lutheran cathedral, the jazz-style tower of the Hotel Torni and pencil-thin chimneys from redundant power stations cut into the ordained pattern. One of the power stations, Hanasaari, which closed down this March, is currently preoccupying the city authorities. They have turned to Buro Happold for advice, in the hope that the firm’s experience with Battersea Power Station may help rescue the 1970s brick shell. A little further east, overlooking the harbour, a gaggle of multi-storey blocks has recently loomed – as if testing the water.
      Another factor is starting to determine the physiognomy of the city centre: some of it is – and more will be – sited below ground. There is no single clear reason for this, though factors include the exigent climate, respect for that polite skyline, and the key part that open space plays as amenity, in the city as in the overwhelmingly forested country.
      The use of subterranean space and the creation of a new realm overhead are becoming a speciality of Helsinki-based architectural practice JKMM. The Amos Rex art museum (named for the Finnish publisher and patron Amos Anderson) sits beneath a swooping pedestrian square – formerly a bus terminal, now an unorthodox playground of sculptural skylights and domes at the foot of a cheerful art-deco clock tower. The galleries below are reached via the handsome glazed entrance of the Lasipalatsi (‘Glass Palace’), part of a restored modernist complex together with the Bio Rex cinema (1936) next door. Elegant stairs sweep into a lobby and the sequence of soaring new galleries. A small traditional gallery space is now showing work collected by the critic, architect and admirer of the Post-Impressionists Sigurd Frosterus, who designed the flagship Stockmann department store (completed in 1930) in central Helsinki, and whose collection was incorporated with Amos Anderson’s in 1994.
      Out on the west coast, an hour’s drive from the city, JKMM, under the same lead architect, Asmo Jaaksi, has just completed the Chappe Art House, a small-scale variant on these ideas. Set in the diminutive surroundings of Tammisaari old town in Ekenäs municipality, the new gallery was the dream of a distinguished professor of human genetics, the late Albert de la Chapelle and his wife, professor Clara Bloomfield. (They both died in 2020, so neither lived to see the outcome.)
      Chappe is a chunky black spruce-clad box, set among a random group of brick and timber buildings, a sprightly cuckoo in the small-town setting. Yet what at first sight looks very small indeed is – displaying the same ingenuity as the Amos Rex – generous in terms of volume and light. The entrance leads to a timbered roofed hall, soaring on a startling scale, a space that is to be both gallery and public meeting place. The simple building, modestly tucked beneath our feet, is a nest of surprises. For its first exhibition, four artists have been invited to respond to a single landscape painting from the de la Chapelle collection.
      A third subterranean structure is due to open in 2027: this is an ambitious underground annex for the National Museum of Finland in central Helsinki. The spectacular new space is flagged by a circular cantilevered entrance, a concrete vortex from which visitors will descend on a series of stairs to the galleries and facilities below. Above, a public garden will be open all year round.
      Aerial view of the centre of Helsinki, which is still a low-rise city (photo: 2020). Photo: Subodh Agnihotri/Alamy Stock Photo
      For decades, visitors to Finland had been drawn by Alvar Aalto’s questing version of modernism, seen as closely aligned with Nordic social democratic aspirations and sustained by a tight group of followers, at home and abroad. Inevitably, his work has been challenged by the passing of time and changing usage. In Helsinki, the shrouded hunk of the white Carrara marble-clad Finlandia Hall, dating from 1971, is in the middle of a recladding expected to take five years; the crisp Academic Book Store of the 1960s – a smart street-front clad in beautifully detailed copper, with dramatic angular roof lights bursting into life within – is compromised by chipped and stained marble facings on the entry columns.
      West of central Helsinki is another post-war landmark: the ‘garden city’ of Tapiola, which has been highly influential in European town planning. It shares its roots with British first-generation New Towns and, patched and amended though it is, it still offers compelling evidence of an urbane landscape, the antithesis of the formless out-of-town development that the critic Ian Nairn called ‘subtopia’. As my guide, Mari Antoni, a resident of 20 years’ standing and former town councillor puts it, ‘The idea of Tapiola is the thing.’
      When considering a future for the best works by Aalto and his circle, there is often a clash between function and feasible preservation, but in Tapiola there is also a town of 9,000 people to consider. The building materials of the early 1950s, especially in schools and sports buildings, have not stood the test of time; the hazards of asbestos are ubiquitous. The swimming hall, already restored once, is wrapped in sheeting and plywood, its fate uncertain. Yet the best of the flats and housing are highly sought after: the terraced houses, with perky monopitch roofs and skinny clerestory windows on to the roadside, benefit from back gardens and immediate access to a natural landscape of rock and pinewoods. The little cinema has been restored and is highly valued, the lake remains centre stage and expanses of open parkland stretch out on every side.
      The societal hopes that brought Tapiola into being in 1953, according to the ideas of a visionary lawyer, Heikki von Hertzen, may have faded. Established according to principles of social enterprise, Tapiola has been outstripped by Espoo, the municipality of which it is a part, and which is a product of modern broad-brush urban development. But Tapiola is more than just a name in the history of town planning – it richly deserves a second look and, even, another close look at those founding principles.
      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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      in Architecture

      The true test of a building is the passing of time

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      The warring Florentine families of the Renaissance included a curious civic gesture as part of the fortress-palaces they erected along the city’s streets and squares. It became customary to include a stone bench at the base of the heavily rusticated exterior walls – initially, it is said, as a reference to the tiered benches around the Piazza della Signoria that served as the theatre for civic assemblies and political wrangling. These benches became an essential part of the palazzo type, where retainers, tradesmen, hangers-on and beggars would wait below the massive sills of windows deliberately placed too high for an outsider to see in. Centuries after the warring families have faded from view, along with the motivations for their metre-thick walls, their benches let hot tourists sit gratefully in the shade of the cold stone.
      At the beginning of a new film by the architectural photographer Jim Stephenson, the camera watches a long bench along a massive wall, punctuated by shallow pilasters, as people – mainly women and children – wait, look at their phones, talk and watch – for a bus, for a child, for a friend; it is for the viewer to guess. The building is a new one, and this is the first generation of people to use this bench; the pilasters are still crisp and the wall has not yet had its first graffiti.
      Still from The Architect has Left the Building (2023) by Jim Stephenson, showing Kingston Town House designed by Grafton Architects. Courtesy RIBA Gallery; © Jim Stephenson
      Photographing architecture for its own sake – and using architecture as a setting for fashion shoots, music videos or primetime dramas – involves careful staging that asks the viewer to read meaning into brick, concrete, metal and glass. Stephenson’s film – currently showing at the RIBA Gallery – elongates that single moment of a photograph, or the scene-setting second of film footage, into a meditation on time. The bench is the first location in a sequence of frames, shown in pairs across a split screen, where the still camera waits and watches as people move across its field of vision. The stationary point of view merges the identity of the camera with that of the building itself, patiently watching and waiting, accommodating movement and use that will gradually wear away at its fabric over the coming years. This building-as-camera projection is amplified by the sounds layered over the footage: vibrations to the fabric of the building in the form of footsteps, bangs and knocks, rain and wind, captured by sound artist Simon James using contact mics, like sound through a stethoscope. The buildings start to seem alive, just on a life cycle far slower than that of the people that crawl in and around them. Like the mountains that folklore claims to be sleeping giants, the buildings patiently await the transfiguration that comes with time.
      Sometimes the view is that of surveillance, the camera perched high above a slender bridge or in the corner of an art gallery. In some frames, a real security camera looks back at the viewer, doubling and redoubling the capture of time and movement like repeating mirrors. One camera adopts the perspective of the security guard, unseen behind a bank of screens, observing the lucky few who enjoy these carefully honed pieces of architecture. How fortunate are the young dancers stretching out their legs on the clean timber steps of a Stirling Prize-winning university building; the neat children whispering in the beautiful miniature theatre at their private school; the residents who won the jackpot in the form of a beautiful community centre or swimming pool, somehow escaping the banality of cost-cutting project managers. More pointedly, a gardener in stained shorts and headphones pushes a lawnmower back and forth below a perfectly formed college library, inside which students enjoy the luxury of contemplation.
      Still from The Architect has Left the Building (2023) by Jim Stephenson, showing Kingston Town House designed by Grafton Architects. Courtesy RIBA Gallery; © Jim Stephenson
      The buildings in Stephenson’s film – all well-designed, acclaimed pieces of architecture – are made of solid, substantial material put together with care. They are captured at the beginning of their lives – as part of a ritual of promotion and press tours – when they are at their most perfect and unsullied. The rain of the Lake District has not yet worn down the timber cladding of a new museum; footsteps have not worn a shine into the centre of a footbridge; only occasionally are the mundane interventions that cause architects to curse – the laminated sign Blu-Tacked to a glazed door – visible to the camera’s eye. Over time there will be repairs, dirt, straggly pot plants, plastic litter bins.
      Buildings are said to be ‘finished’ when construction ends, but this is really their moment of birth. After a decade or two of love and appreciation, they go through a protracted and usually problematic mid-life, before – if time is kind and public opinion held at bay – emerging as heritage, their histories smoothed over by the adaptation to new uses for new times. Their flaws and fragilities are exposed in the ugly phase and, if serious enough, condemn the building to demolition or major surgery. In Stephenson’s observations we don’t see the ageing of insulation, the gnawing away of wiring by mice or the slow dripping and cracking of pipes. The creaking of air handling units, the filters clogging up; faults in the software of the building management systems. The seals in double-glazing units failing. Black mould creeping up plasterboard. Lurking behind the optimism of dappled light falling across a perfect wall, the unmoving eye of the camera poses a nagging question: how many of these buildings will survive for future generations, or is their seeming solidity concealing frailties that will lead to the wrecking ball? How quickly, or slowly, will all that investment – of money, of carbon, of labour – turn to dust?
      ‘The Architect has left the Building’ is at the RIBA Gallery, London, until 12 August. More

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      in Architecture

      The saving of St Mary-le-Strand

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      From the May 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
      The Church of St Mary-le-Strand was once known to London bus drivers as ‘St Mary’s in the Way’. Standing in the middle of the Strand, a congested artery between Westminster and the City of London, the church was long seen by motorists and urban planners alike as little more than an obstruction. Over the three centuries since its consecration in 1724, the road surrounding the church was gradually widened, taking great bites out of the churchyard and threatening to devour the church itself. Threats to the church only seemed to grow. John Betjeman’s last poem was written as part of a campaign to protect it. In 2017, it seemed its luck had finally run out. With the congregation in single digits, the Church of England prepared to sell it off to become a UK outpost of the Museum of the Bible (in Washington, D.C.). Stripped of furniture and fittings, it would have been little more than an empty shell.
      This would have been a travesty. For the church, particularly its interior, is one of London’s architectural glories. It was designed by the Scottish-born architect James Gibbs (1682–1754), his first public commission after his return from Rome, where he had trained in the studio of Carlo Fontana. For an untested young architect, the prominently sited church provided an unrivalled opportunity. He was awarded it as part of his work as Surveyor for the Commission for Fifty New Churches, a body established in 1710 as a monument both to Queen Anne and to the High Church, High Tory ascendancy of her final years. Beginning as the queen’s health deteriorated, the Commissioners knew that they had only limited time to execute their plans. Indeed, when Anne died in 1714, the incoming Hanoverian royal family and its sober Whig ministry quickly wound down the Commission. Only 12 of 50 projected churches were built.
      Those that were built, however – the others were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer – are among the outstanding examples of English architecture of any period. With the Commission eager to make an impression quickly, budgets were almost unlimited. Gibbs seized the chance to show off everything he had learned in Italy. He did not quite have carte blanche, having inherited the foundations of an earlier project by Archer. His initial role had been to design a 250-foot-high monumental column to Queen Anne to stand in front of the church; when she died, however, the commissioners quickly dropped the column and focused their energies on the church, which Gibbs designed, taking on some of Archer’s ideas.
      In his executed design, Gibbs decided to make the same point as the monumental column but more subtly. He took his cues from St Paul’s Cathedral – completed in 1711 after nearly half a century of work – showing the sophistication of his Italian training by reworking Christopher Wren’s ideas in a new context. The semi-circular projections of the west and east elevations were inspired, respectively, by the north porch and east end of St Paul’s and, inside, the disposition of the east end closely matches Wren’s design. The ornamental quality of the design is created by Gibbs’s ingenious compression of motifs deriving from St Paul’s into a much smaller area.When built, the church was always expected to be in the centre of London’s life and traffic – in A Book of Architecture (1728), Gibbs explained that he had inserted windows only in the upper storey of the north and south elevations, with niches below, ‘to keep out Noises from the Street’. Of all the churches projected by the commission, St Mary-le-Strand was perhaps the most prominently situated, a point not lost on its architect; he explained elsewhere that ‘the Building can not be too fine for the situation, since it’s so much in viue.’ As envisaged, it was to have been a major monument on the royal processional route into the City of London, something obscured by the comparative unpopularity of the early Hanoverians, under whom it was finished, and their dislike of public processions.
      Since last year, the church’s urban context, so important to its design and history, has been completely transformed. Gone are the streams of traffic that smothered it on either side, replaced by raised beds and picnic benches, part of a scheme to unite the campuses of three of London’s universities, King’s College, the London School of Economics and the Courtauld Institute, into a single ‘Global Cultural Thinking Quarter’. Once an inconvenience, the church is now hailed as the ‘jewel in the Strand’, the focus of London’s newest piazza. The project is not yet totally successful. The zigzagging benches in the supposedly Italianate piazza have a strange, playground quality, and the aims of the and the aims of the Global Cultural Thinking Quarter seem ill-defined. Yet, visiting a year on, a once unappealing – and dangerous – thoroughfare is populated with people, loitering, taking in their surroundings and visiting the church.
      With St Mary’s at last protected from the engine fumes that have for so long blackened and corroded its exterior stonework, and from the developer’s wrecking ball that threatened it in the 19th century, it is now possible to look towards preserving the fabric for future generations. One major ambition is to make the raised ground floor accessible and also turn the crypt (intended for burials) into usable space for events and church activities. On such a cramped site, the project will undoubtedly be challenging. Above ground, the church hopes to restore original features and relight the space to show its magnificent plasterwork ceiling to better advantage. The interior fittings, though the result of several reworkings, retain important original elements. To help achieve this, the church has been awarded a grant of £3.9 million by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and is currently fundraising for the additional £4.5 million needed for its ambitious plans.
      In 1716, as work on the church continued, Gibbs’s former patron John Erskine, Earl of Mar, wrote to the architect from exile in France (Erskine was a Jacobite). It was, he thought, Gibbs’s ‘fair daughter in the Strand […] the most complete little damsel in town’. If done right, the restoration now being planned may bring this church to completion once more.
      From the May 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More