Growing old, one loses one’s capacity to be shocked. But lately I have been shocked by the senior clergy in our neck of the woods.
Somers Town is just north of the British Library and Euston Station. It has always been a deprived neighbourhood. It was from here that the infant Dickens set out on his long walk to the Blacking Warehouse in Hungerford Old Stairs.
Here, in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, ‘Father Hilary Cherwell … restores faith in the church’ by his building sanitary housing for his parishioners.
When he arrived as a curate after WWI, Father Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) – the original of Father Hilary; and nephew of the great admiral – found families squeezed into rat-infested lodgings with no a. He rehoused thousands of people, not by getting state aid, but by appealing to rich friends: ‘In the name of the babe of Bethlehem, will you help this church build new homes?’
His name still lives – as does his vision. The St Pancras Housing Association, which he founded in 1924, was eventually taken over by the London County Council. But not before the idea of ‘social housing’ had spread to boroughs all over the UK.
One of his famous sayings was ‘Housing is not enough.’ People need nursery schools, affordable furniture, children’s holidays and decent pubs, where the clientele can’t spend their entire weekly wage on booze. All this, and more, Jellicoe supplied, wearing himself out and dying by the age of 36.
St Mary’s kept alive his tradition of humane Anglican Catholicism – running a good school, supplying help to the waifs and strays who haunt that lonely, railway-terminusy part of London, providing space for rough sleepers, rescuing junkies etc etc. The present vicar, Father Paschal, is much loved.
Like most 19th-century buildings, St Mary’s needs repairs. It began its life being mocked. Only ten years after it was consecrated in 1826, A W N Pugin, in Contrasts (1836), was lampooning the architects (William Inwood and son Henry) for their experiment with a ‘Gothic’ style. He described the front as ‘ludicrous … with doors so high that giants may get through’.
But what he was not to know was that giants did get through. Giants like Jellicoe, and giants like the congregation of today, which has received a severe battering by the march of events.
HS2 has helped to gut much of the parish. People have been forced to move house. The level of poverty is high. St Mary’s feels like the beating heart of this poor area, and you might have thought that the Church of England would cherish it.
I began by suggesting I’m not easily shocked. On 22nd October, I sat in the church to witness the Archdeacon of Hampstead telling the people of Somers Town that unless they could find £1.7 million to repair the place, he was going to start the process of demolition.
He did not suggest by one syllable that he would stand by this community in its hour of need, or help them to raise the money needed for repairs.
At the Q and A session, he asked each questioner their name but, replying, invariably got their name wrong – which seemed revealing.
Neither he nor the other ecclesiastical bureaucrats had given any warning at all to the vicar or the churchwardens. He has followed this up with an email, giving them an impossibly short time to get their act together and resist.
The letter lets slip that he had in fact already started the process of applying to demolish the church well over a month before his visitation.
Of course, the churchwardens, highly intelligent and motivated women, are going to fight this every inch of the way. They have already got the Victorian Society on the case, and the excellent Griff Rhys Jones, President, has said the diocesan decision is ‘extraordinary’.
An appeal for money will be launched, though it will be impossible to find the sums demanded by the archdeacon by Christmas, as his letter half-seems to demand.
The Church bureaucrats want to demolish a place that has been sacred to this community for 200 years and put up a block of flats. Any humane person would see a place where generations of human lives have experienced grief, loss, poverty, joy; a place where the poor have been treated with dignity and respect.
The Church – ye gods, the Church! – sees the chance to rid itself of a problem, and to make a nice little earner.
One should not be shocked, but I am. I am never going to use the phrase ‘dear old C of E’ again. Galsworthy saw this place as restoring faith in the Church, and it still is, if only the Philistines in charge of the diocese would allow the people of Somers Town to do so.
The Oldie December 2023
