Selling Our Churches,
BY JOHN BETJEMAN N Easter Sunday the last service will be said in the little Church of St. Peter, Windmill Street, Piccadilly Circus. The Bishop of London has sold the site to a commercial firm for £150,000. One of Prebendary Clarence May's congregation offered the Bishop £150,000 to keep the Church open. This offer was refused, and we can only con- clude that the Bishop felt himself so far committed commer- cially that he would rather sell his Church than offend Mammon. I do not know who has bought the site, but if it is 10 become a restaurant, we may assume that very soon where Londoners worshipped their Saviour on their knees, business men will eat meals on their, expense accounts. , Beyond some friendly comments on behalf of St. Peter's in the London evening papers and the Church Times, little Publicity has attended the sale. The London Diocesan Advisory Committee, on which I have the honour to sit, was not con- plied as to the merits of the building. The congregation, if It was consulted, has resignedly accepted dismissal. The Vicar, the Revd. Clarence May, has been consoled with a Prebendal Stall in St. Paul's, and been-told to take his congregation to the far-off church of St. George's, Bloomsbury. London churchmen as a whole knew nothing of these negotiations. „Mach as I admire the Bishop of London and his reorganisation scheme for the City Churches, I know I am not alone in acgarding his decision to sell St. Peter's, Windmill Street, as !hort-sighted and unimaginative. For of all sites in islitain, St. Peter's is probably today the most valuable mission pUtpost of the Faith now left in the possession of the Church in London.
One reason for its value is that there are so few churches remaining in the West End of London. In the three boroughs of Central London; Marylebone, Westminster and Holborn, 47 churches have been demolished since 1904, four by German bombs and 43 by Bishops. Among recent casualties in the second category we can most of us remember is the charming little eighteenth-century parish chapel in Marylebone High Street, which had its boxpews, galleries and elegant tablets to Parish worthies of Georgian days. It has been pulled down !ice the war. Many will remember how, travelling on top of a bus down Charing Cross Road, one used to see a great "i,rocifix on the dark red brick east wall of St. Mary-the-Virgin's ,,""uurch, with the Awards under it " Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? " Apparently it was nothing, and that mysterious and imposing interior designed by J. Brookes is one for ever. One of the most beautiful and original churches London with a cool, grey neo-Romanesque interior was St. iuselm's, Davies Street, designed by Balfour and Thackeray -turner. A travesty of it, using some of the stones, has been ejected in the north-western suburbs. But St. Andrew's, Wells _Ntreet, a far less impressive and mid-Victorian building, was most carefully re-erected in Wembley. The regret for St. Peter's, Windmill Street, can be expressed ertlY in terms of architecture but mostly in terms of the Portant position of its site. It is wedged in between Scott's Vld the Trocadero in that narrow bit of the street which leads Shaftesbury Avenue to the top of the Haymarket. It is an unobtrusive building in the French Gothic style designed dY ,Raphael Brandon in 1860. Raphael and his brother had ines'gned, five years earlier, the fine Catholic Apostolic Church _ Gordon Square. Inside, St. Peter's has narrow aisles, a lofty 'tdve and apsidal east end. It is dark and homely, the sort of Place which the average uninstructed passer-by would think was an old church left behind in London and reminiscent of the village church at home. Moreover, he or she can quickly go into it from the pavement without anyone seeing. Compared with the nearest churches, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields or St. James's, Piccadilly, it is most people's idea of what a church ought to look like. The white and gilded splendour of the Renaissance interiors of these two neighbouring churches can never have the same appeal to humble and unsophisticated people. As for St. Thomas's, Regent Street, the only other church in the crowded heart of London to be left standing, it is often used for plays, with a telephone and ticket office in the porch. And besides that it is yet one more classic building, less splendid than St. Martin's or St. James's, and so still not a church in the sense in which many people under- stand that word.
The great value of St. Peter's as a mission station is its site. Not a minute passes from eight a.m. until one the next morning without someone passing its locked doors. .How many prostitutes or people lost in London, of all ages and races, might not have found sanctuary and advice here, had this church been kept open until midnight and staffed by some organisation like the Church Army or Toc H or by a com- munity of mission priests? St. Peter's could have been not just a weekday lunch-hour resort, like the City churches, but one which did well in the evening and late into the night. Then the porch facing the street could have been turned into a bookstall or a church office. As it was, the church was crowded for its Sunday services. To say that St. James's, St. Thomas's or St. Martin's can sapply the need which this perfectly sited little church could have supplied in the most used and depraved part of London is to disregard its geographical situation. It is on an island with a coastline of crowded pavements. Today the rivers of London are not just the Thames, but the main roads. To cross the traffic to Piccadilly or to find one's way to Leicester Square is a long and complicated business, more tedious to cross and less inviting than a bridge over the Thames. The lost and bewildered seeking sanctuary would lose heart long before they reached the imposing and comparatively forbidding entrances of St. James's or St. Martin's. The argument for the destruction of St. Peter's is familiar. " We want the money to build churches in the vast new suburbs of Greater London." That may be, but Greater London comes o Piccadilly Circus at all hours of the day. In these days of Cheap transport, it is the places where people congregate that :also need churches. A live church such as All Saints' Margaret Street, All Souls' Langham Place, or St. Martin's-in-the-Fields does not have to have residential parishioners to keep it crowded. If it is open and staffed it will attract people who will come from all over London to attend its services. Such 'a church could St. Peter's, Windmill Street, have been. No church in the whole of London was better situated for mission work. It looks to me as though the Bishop has been advised by keen young business efficiency experts who, for all their sincerity, have let money and population statistics argue their case for closing the church. But imagination and a little more Faith, Hope and Charity would have kept it open.
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