St John at Hackney is a Grade II* listedAnglican Church in the heart of the London Borough of Hackney with a large capacity of around 2,000. It was built in 1792 to replace Hackney's medieval parish church, of which St Augustine's Tower remains, at the edge of its churchyard. The church faces north towards Clapton Square, with the nearby Sutton House and Hackney Central station also accessible from the churchyard to the east and south, respectively. As well as a thriving parish church, St John at Hackney has also become known as a notable music venue, playing host to the likes of Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Emeli Sande, Robbie Williams, Griff and Interpol.
The church of St John at Hackney was designed by James Spiller and built in 1792,[1] when demand in the parish of Hackney was in excess of 3,000 parishioners. At an original 3,300 acres (13km2), at the time the parish was the largest civil parish in Middlesex of those which joined the County of London (created in 1889).[2] The vast, classical, stock-brick building, on a Greek Cross plan, can hold around 2,000 people.[1] The building is Grade II* listed and contains monuments dating from the early sixteenth century, which were transferred from the medieval parish church.
St Augustine's Church
It is possible that a chapel stood here serving the small, prosperous manor of Hackney north of the City of London, before the Norman Conquest. No records survive of a conceivable chapel before 1275 for a chapelry within the parish of Stepney which covered the 13km2 of Hackney (see St Dunstan's, Stepney). From the 14th century the church was dedicated to Saint Augustine of Hippo until, in 1660, it was rededicated to Saint John the Baptist, thenceforth becoming commonly known as St John at Hackney.[2]
c.1750 View of St Augustine's Tower showing the (then) adjacent Black and White House
Growing congregation
Hackney's proximity to the City of London and the royal court made it popular with courtiers, city merchants and businessmen. An increasing number of private schools were established in some of the older houses. By 1789 the church capacity, with the addition of numerous galleries, had reached 1,000. This, however, was not enough.[2]
In 1779 a surveyor, Richard Jupp, proposed a rebuilding to increase the capacity to 1,480, but no action was taken. By 1788 a committee found that the population of the parish had increased so much that the church should seek to seat 3,000. The appointed architect, William Blackburn, firmly rejected the idea of building on the old site, advising that a budget of £15,000 be created to buy land on which to construct a new church.[2]
In April 1789 the committee put the matter to a parochial vote, winning their case by 313 votes to 70. A bill was put to the House of Commons. Opponents of the proposal undertook yet another survey with a view to rebuilding on the old site. Finally a compromise was reached; the bill became an act empowering the trustees to acquire, for £875, Church Field which lay to the north-east of the existing churchyard.
New church
1812 engraving of the church, without a tower
A new church, tower and vestry room would be built within three years of laying the foundation and the old church subsequently demolished, with only its Tower remaining. In the event the initial estimates of costs were significantly incorrect and two further acts had to be passed through Parliament to allow extra money to be raised.
William Blackburn died suddenly in November 1790; a month later James Spiller, influenced by and a friend of Sir John Soane, was chosen from six candidates; Hackney Church was his largest project to date and remains Spiller's magnum opus. Believing that a building seating 3,000 would have poor acoustics, he persuaded the trustees to allow him to reduce the capacity to 2,000, but remained convinced that the acoustics would not be good unless the church was full.
Work began in 1792 and the main structure took more than two years to complete. The church was consecrated on 15 July 1797.
Loddiges' family vault in St John's Church Gardens
Harry Sedgwick, a trustee, oversaw a subscription for planting the churchyard. 129 subscriptions enabled nearly 200 elms and horse chestnuts to be planted in avenues. Sedgwick was later buried in the churchyard; and his planting achievement is commemorated on his tomb. Sedgwick lost his only son in action in the Napoleonic War; he has an elaborate memorial inside the church.
In March 1798 the body of the old church was demolished and several of the tombs removed to the new church. The tower remained - left intact to hold the bells as funds did not allow building a tower on the new church. In 1814 the tower was added to the church and, in 1816, a stained glass east window was installed behind the altar.
The old tower of St Augustine's Church remains standing and plays a symbolic and ceremonial role in Hackney: it has adorned the masthead of the Hackney Gazette since its foundation in 1864 and is incorporated in the coat of arms of the London Borough of Hackney. In 1871 an appeal was launched to provide the tower with a four-faced clock, and this was duly installed by Gillet & Brand on New Year's Day in 1872.
In 1890 the church purchased the early 16th-century house on Homerton High Street, in the grounds of which was constructed a school, and the house named the St John's Church Institute. This would later be purchased by the National Trust, and is now known as Sutton House.
The churchyard closed to burials in 1859, after which it became overgrown and derelict. It was laid out by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association's landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson, which included the demolition of Henry Rowe's 1614 mortuary chapel, and opened for public recreation in 1894.[3]
In 1902 the church was renovated and had electric lights installed, the repairs and alterations costing £1,823.[4] In the 1920s, with the roof becoming structurally unstable, the church was forced to temporarily close, with the timbers being shored up with scaffolding. The roof was reconstructed in 1929.
The war dead of Hackney are commemorated by a stone monolith in the churchyard in front of the north entrance, erected in 1921.
The repairs to the roof had not entirely fixed the problems of the 1920s, and further reconstruction work was scheduled for the summer of 1954, which was scheduled for completion on 19 May 1955.
On 18 May 1955 a fire started in the church roof among workmen's tools, destroying the roof, some of the pews and the 1799 organ by George Pike England. During the ensuing major reconstruction work there was some reordering of the interior, including the insertion of a partition at the south end of the nave of the church to create the Hurdman Hall.
A replacement three manual Mander organ came from All Saint's Ennismore Gardens, Kensington; altar hangings designed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey were donated; and the east window replaced by a new one designed by Christopher Webb. The new church was reconsecrated on 24 June 1958 (St John's Day).
At the fête on 5 July 2008, the church and its churchyard were rededicated by the Archdeacon of Hackney, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the reconstruction and the major works undertaken to regenerate the church gardens over the previous year. St John's Church Gardens, around the tower and church, were awarded both a Green Flag award and Green Flag Heritage status in 2008. As of 2022, St John at Hackney churchyard currently holds a Green Flag award.[5]
With the fabric of the church still requiring significant maintenance, a multi-million pound Restoration project began in 2018, which claims to reconfigure the church to its original Greek Cross plan, reconnecting the church with its original architectural language, and providing more space for a range of activities, including church services and use as a music venue. New features will include the creation of two new chapels in the north and south wings, a raised stage and a range of new facilities.
Operation of the church
Clergy
The current Rector of Hackney is Rev'd Al Gordon, who was instituted by the Bishop of Stepney in 2016. Other clergy include Rev'd Mark Nelson, Associate Rector, and Rev'd Naomi Maxwell, Curate.
Restoration project
In 2018, St John at Hackney embarked on a multimillion-pound Restoration project, including a £1.84 million-pound grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The design team included John Pawson CBE and Es Devlin OBE. In 2019, the church opened new community facilities in the adjacent Hackney Gardens development to enable it to grow its outreach work and activity. The church re-opened for worship and live events in September 2020, and has since welcome thousands of people through its doors.
The restoration of the church was awarded an RIBA National Award in 2022.[6]
William Butterfield was a British Gothic Revival architect and associated with the Oxford Movement. He is noted for his use of polychromy.
Stepney is a district in the East End of London in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The district is no longer officially defined, and is usually used to refer to a relatively small area. However, for much of its history the place name applied to a much larger manor and parish. Stepney Green is a remnant of a larger area of Common Land formerly known as Mile End Green.
St Dunstan's, Stepney, is an Anglican church which stands on a site that has been used for Christian worship for over a thousand years. It is located in Stepney High Street, in Stepney, London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
John Loughborough Pearson was a British Gothic Revival architect renowned for his work on churches and cathedrals. Pearson revived and practised largely the art of vaulting, and acquired in it a proficiency unrivalled in his generation. He worked on at least 210 ecclesiastical buildings in England alone in a career spanning 54 years.
Christ Church Spitalfields is an Anglican church built between 1714 and 1729 to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor. On Commercial Street in the East End and in today's Central London it is in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, on its western border facing the City of London, it was one of the first of the so-called "Commissioners' Churches" built for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, which had been established by an Act of Parliament in 1711.
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St Mary's, Harrow on the Hill, is the Borough and Parish Church at Harrow on the Hill in northwest London, England. It is a Grade I-listed building.
Hackney was a parish in the historic county of Middlesex. The parish church of St John-at-Hackney was built in 1789, replacing the nearby former 16th-century parish church dedicated to St Augustine. The original tower of that church was retained to hold the bells until the new church could be strengthened; the bells were finally removed to the new St John's in 1854. See details of other, more modern, churches within the original parish boundaries below.
All Saints Church, Poplar, is a church in Newby Place, Poplar, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and is the Church of England parish church of Poplar. It was built in 1821–3 to serve the newly created parish.
Bow Church is the parish church of St Mary and Holy Trinity, Stratford, Bow. It is located on a central reservation site in Bow Road, in Bow, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. There has been a church on the same site for approximately 700 years. The church was bombed in the Second World War, and the bell tower was reconstructed just after the war.
St Augustine's Tower stands in St John's Church Gardens, in central Hackney, in the London Borough of Hackney, just off the southern end of the Narrow Way. It is all that remains of the early 16th-century parish church of Hackney of St Augustine, which replaced the 13th-century medieval church founded by the Knights of St John. The Tower comprises four stages beneath a restored parapet with diagonal buttressing. A fine working 16th-century turret clock has remained on the third floor of the Tower since at least 1608. The Tower and contents are Grade I listed.
Clapton Square is the second largest garden square in the London Borough of Hackney, located in Lower Clapton, Clapton. It is lined by buildings on three sides. Its Conservation Area designated in 1969 – extended in 1991 and 2000 – takes in a larger green space separated by a stretch of open road: St John's Gardens. Those gardens have the tallest and largest building visible from all parts of the square's garden, the Church of St John-at-Hackney, rebuilt in 1792-97 which contains older monuments. Two sides of the square are lined with tall, partly stone-dressed, classical, Georgian terraced houses.
St Bartholomew's Church is in the town of Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. It is an active Anglican parish church in the diocese of Chester, the archdeaconry of Macclesfield and the deanery of Knutsford.
St Peter's Church is in the village of Waverton, Cheshire, England. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building. It is an active Anglican parish church in the diocese of Chester, the archdeaconry of Chester and the deanery of Malpas. Its benefice is combined with those of St John, Aldford and St Mary, Bruera.
St John the Evangelist is an Anglican church on Friern Barnet Road in north London. It is a late example of the Gothic Revival Style by Victorian architect John Loughborough Pearson, begun in 1890-91 and completed after his death by his son Frank Loughborough Pearson.
St Mary Matfelon church, popularly known as St Mary's, Whitechapel, was a Catholic then after the English Reformation a Church of England parish church on Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel, London. It is repeatedly supposed by many works and oral histories that the church was covered in a lime whitewash, which gave the chapelry (district) its common name, Whitechapel. Around 1320, it became called St Mary Matfelon. About that time it became a parish in its own right but its priest for many years was a nominee of the Rector of Stepney. The church's earliest known priest was Hugh de Fulbourne in 1329. Last rebuilt in the 19th century, the church was firebombed during the Blitz leading to its demolition in 1952. Its nave's stone footprint and graveyard – its headstones removed – are the basis of Altab Ali Park on the south side of the thoroughfare.
Mare Street is a street in the London Borough of Hackney. It has existed since the 15th century, when it was one of the first roads at the centre of the parish. It was then known as Merestret. The word mere was either the Old English mǣre meaning a boundary — referring to the boundary with the parish of Stepney — or mere, a large pond which was fed by Hackney Brook.
The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association is a charity in London for the purposes of the preservation of public parks and gardens, established in 1882. It facilitated the creation of new public open spaces, including from philanthropic landowners within its membership. The MPGA was involved in the formation and development of other amenity organisations. The charity still exists; in recent decades its emphasis has changed to smaller parcels of land and smaller projects within larger spaces, as well as to themed projects. The MPGA was the starting point for the careers of the ground-breaking female landscape gardeners Fanny Wilkinson and Madeline Agar.
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