25 new churches to visit in London

St Saviour, Eltham

I’ve been putting all the down-time during the lockdown while waiting for files to upload or transfer over the internet to good use! I have spent much of it looking through the two excellent volumes by Michael Yelton &; John Salmon ‘Anglican Church-Building in London’. Volume 1 covers the period 1915-1945 and the follow-up covers the period 1946-2012.

There are hundreds of churches listed with accompanying black and white photographs. All of them would make for excellent visits but for the purposes of this list I have tried to limit myself to my favourite twenty five – excluding those churches I know well (like St Paul’s Bow Common or John Keble, Mill Hill). The twenty five ‘new’ churches in the list are therefore both new in age (relatively speaking) and new to me. Once the lockdown is over it will be good to visit these fascinating buildings. Like the books, this list is organised alphabetically by borough and I have used images from a variety of sources and information from the excellent London Church Buildings website to find out more.

BOOK REVIEW : Phoenix at Coventry. The Building of a Cathedral by Basil Spence

One of the great joys of Bloomsbury is the number of second-hand bookshops to explore. It was wonderful to discover this book recently. Written four months before the consecration of Coventry Cathedral on 25th May 1962, Basil Spence guides us through his eleven years of “toil, frustration, hope and ecstasy” as the cathedral was designed and built. My own office has not (yet) had the opportunity to work on such a prestigious commission but what is striking from Spence’s account of the design and development process is that we often share many of the same challenges, frustrations and joys – albeit on a much more modest scale.

Congregation Festival – Celebrating the Architecture of Sacred Space

St Theresia Church, Linz - Rudolf Schwarz

On Saturday 29th February 2020, the Architecture Foundation held a one day conference at St Mary's Paddington. "Congregation" drew together architects, academics and philosophers to discuss building spaces for worship.