St Christopher's Chapel | |
---|---|
51°31′20″N0°07′16″W / 51.5222°N 0.121°W | |
Location | Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury, London |
Country | England |
Denomination | Ecumenical |
Previous denomination | Anglican |
History | |
Status | Active |
Dedication | Saint Christopher |
Consecrated | 18 November 1875 by Alfred Barry |
Architecture | |
Functional status | Hospital chapel |
Heritage designation | Grade II* |
Designated | 10 March 1980 |
Architect(s) | Edward Middleton Barry |
Completed | 1875 |
St Christopher's Chapel is the chapel of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England. It is a grade II* listed building and is noted for its highly decorated interior.
Great Ormond Street Hospital was built from 1871 to 1876, and the chapel was completed in 1875. [1] [2] It had been designed by Edward Middleton Barry who donated his work to the hospital in memory of one of his children who had died in infancy. [1] [3] The chapel cost £60,000 to build. [4] The chapel is a small rectangle with an apse at its east end. [1] Its interior is highly decorated. [5] The chapel was consecrated on 18 November 1875 by Canon Alfred Barry, later Bishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia. [4]
On 10 March 1980, the chapel was designated a grade II* listed building. [1]
Due to its listed status, the chapel could not be demolished when the old hospital building was knocked down in the 1980s. [2] It was decided that the whole chapel would be moved to a new site. [2] This was done by encasing the chapel in a large, water-proof box and underpinning with a concrete raft. [2] [6] Having emptied the interior of all its furniture and removed the stained-glass windows, the now encased chapel was lowered from the first floor to the ground floor. [2] It was then moved by hydraulic rams to its new location; [2] this is "thought to be the largest en bloc transportation of a structure ever undertaken". [6] Six years after it was moved and after extensive renovation, the chapel was re-opened on 14 February 1994 by Diana, Princess of Wales. [2]
The chapel is open at all times for patients, families and staff.
It is not open to the general public. [7]
There is a service of morning prayer at 10:30 am Monday to Friday.
The chapel has a prayer tree where messages of hope and support can be written for sick children at the hospital and placed on the tree. [8]
The chapel has been described as of the Franco-Italianate style and was influenced by the Renaissance Revival. [1] [3] The chapel "is divided by four columns, and has a central dome, with an apse at the east end". [5] The terrazzo floor was designed by Antonio Salviati, an Italian mosaicist, and is said to be influenced by a pavement in St Mark's Basilica, Venice. [2]
The interior is highly decorated with many of its images referring to childhood. [5] The central dome is "painted with musician angels around the rim and pelican in piety" in its centre. [1] The apse windows are stained glass designed by Clayton and Bell, and depict the childhood of Jesus Christ. [1] The ceiling of the apse is decorated with eight angels (Faith, Truth, Patience, Purity, Obedience, Charity, Honour and Hope) with a central roundel depicting the Lamb and flag. [1]
There are a number of Bible quotes with accompanying murals decorating the walls. These include "Suffer little children to come unto me" (Luke 18:16) and "feed my lambs + feed my sheep" (John 21:16). [1] [5] Above the door it states: "I was glad when they said unto me let us go into the House of the Lord" (Psalm 122:1).
There are a number of memorial plaques on the walls of the chapel. They include:
Chorlton-on-Medlock is an inner city area of Manchester, in the county of Greater Manchester, England.
Great Ormond Street Hospital is a children's hospital located in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, and a part of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust.
Evelina London Children's Hospital is a specialist NHS hospital in London, England. It is administratively a part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and provides teaching facilities for London South Bank University and King's College London School of Medicine. Formerly housed at Guy's Hospital in Southwark, it moved to a new building alongside St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth on 31 October 2005.
All Saints' Church is an active English-speaking chaplaincy of the Church of England's Diocese in Europe - a part of the Anglican Communion - in Rome, Italy.
The Never Land Books or Never Land Adventures are a series of short chapter books set in Never Land, the home of Peter Pan. They are based on the situations and characters established in the novel Peter and the Starcatchers and its sequels. Like the novels, the books are written by American authors Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson and illustrated by Greg Call. Although five Never Land books were planned, only three were published: Escape from the Carnivale (2006), Cave of the Dark Wind (2007), and Blood Tide (2008). The stories focus on supporting characters from the novels, such as the Mollusk Island Natives, mermaids, pirates, and Lost Boys.
St Dominic's Priory Church is one of the largest Catholic churches in London. The church is Grade II* listed building on the National Heritage List for England. It has been served by the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) since 1861, the community living in the adjacent Priory. In October 2016, the church was solemnly inaugurated by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, as a diocesan shrine, with a designated mission of promoting the Rosary.
All Hallows Twickenham is a Grade I listed church and parish of the Church of England in Twickenham, London. It incorporates the tower of All Hallows Lombard Street and is prominently south of a major road of west London, near Twickenham Stadium, specifically the Chertsey Road (A316).
The UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) is an academic department of the Faculty of Population Health Sciences of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1946 and together with its clinical partner Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), forms the largest concentration of children's health research in Europe. In 1996 the Institute merged with University College London. Current research focusses on broad biomedical topics within child health, ranging from developmental biology, to genetics, to immunology and epidemiology.
The Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in St John's Wood, London, England, is a Catholic charitable general hospital in north London.
John Eric Deanfield is a British professor of cardiology and past Olympic fencer.
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS Foundation Trust that operates Great Ormond Street Hospital. It is closely associated with University College London (UCL) and in partnership with the UCL Institute of Child Health, which it is located adjacent to, is the largest centre for research and postgraduate teaching in children’s health in Europe. It is part of both the Great Ormond Street Hospital/UCL Institute of Child Health Biomedical Research Centre and the UCL Partners academic health science centre.
Hilary Dawn Cass, Baroness Cass,, is a British paediatrician. She was the chair of the British Academy of Childhood Disability, established the Rett Clinic for children with Rett syndrome, and has worked to develop palliative care for children. She led the Cass Review of gender identity services in England, which was completed in 2024. Cass was appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench life peer in the same year.
Faraneh Vargha-Khadem is a British cognitive neuroscientist specializing in developmental amnesia among children. Faraneh was a part of the team that identified the FOXP2 gene, the so-called 'speech gene', that may explain why humans talk and chimps do not.
The Charlie Gard case was a best interests case in 2017 involving Charles Matthew William "Charlie" Gard, an infant boy from London, born with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS), a rare genetic disorder that causes progressive brain damage and muscle failure. MDDS has no treatment and usually causes death in infancy. The case became controversial because the medical team and parents disagreed about whether experimental treatment was in the best interests of the child.
Maria Bitner-Glindzicz was a British medical doctor, honorary consultant in clinical genetics at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and a professor of human and molecular genetics at the UCL Institute of Child Health. The hospital described her work as relating to the "genetic causes of deafness in children and therapies that she hoped would one day restore vision." She researched Norrie disease and Usher syndrome, working with charities including Sparks and the Norrie Disease Foundation, and was one of the first colleagues involved in the 100,000 Genomes Project at Genomics England.
Russell Mardon Viner, FMedSci is an Australian-British paediatrician and policy researcher who is Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department for Education and Professor of Adolescent Health at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. He is an expert on child and adolescent health in the UK and internationally. He was a member of the UK Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) during the COVID-19 pandemic and was President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health from 2018 to 2021. He remains clinically active, seeing young people with diabetes each week at UCL Hospitals. Viner is vice-chair of the NHS England Transformation Board for Children and Young People and Chair of the Stakeholder Council for the Board. He is a non-executive director (NED) at Great Ormond St. Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, also sitting on the Trust's Finance & Investment and the Quality and Safety sub-committees.
"You Taught Me What Love Is" is a song by English singer-songwriter Beth Porch, released after her performance on Britain's Got Talent which aired on 18 April 2020.
Beth Porch is an English pop singer, who rose to fame after appearing on the fourteenth series of Britain's Got Talent. She performed an original song for her audition, "You Taught Me What Love Is", which was subsequently released as a single to raise money for the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Porch is also a children's nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Through her semi final performance, she sang another original song called 'everyday heroes', in October 2020. After she got eliminated from BGT, she continued to work in children's hospitals throughout the pandemic.
Noor ul Owase Jeelani is a Kashmiri-British neurosurgeon and academic. He is a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) and was the Head of the Department of Neurosurgery from 2012 until 2018. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Institute of Child Health, University College London. He leads the FaceValue research group in Craniofacial Morphometrics, device design, and clinical outcomes.
Dame Lyn Susan Chitty is a British physician and Professor of Genetics and Fetal Medicine at University College London. She is the deputy director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre. She is the 2022 president of the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis. Her research considers non-invasive prenatal diagnostics. She was made a Dame in the 2022 New Year Honours.