Church Of Christ The King And Attached Railings And Walls

Church of Christ the King and Attached Railings and Walls

A Grade I listed building on Gordon Square, Camden. This church was built between 1851 and 1854 by J.R. Brandon and is constructed of Bath stone ashlar with tiled roofs. It was originally known as the Catholic Apostolic Church and served as the headquarters of the Catholic Apostolic Church of the Irvingites. It is now the Church of England Chaplaincy to the University of London.

The building follows a cruciform plan with a central tower, designed in Early English style at cathedral scale. The church comprises a 5-bay aisled nave with full triforium and clerestory, a 3-bay sanctuary with side aisles, and a 3-bay Lady Chapel. The design remains incomplete: only 5 of the 7 projected nave bays were built, the west wall is a temporary brick structure, and the crossing tower was never finished. It was originally intended to support a spire 300 feet high.

The exterior features a gabled entrance porch at the east end, with angle buttresses and a moulded pointed arch entrance surmounted by a 2-light window with oculus plate tracery. This porch is linked to the Lady Chapel by an octagonal turret with a 2-light room above. The north side entrance is approached via a cloister walk from the porch. The Lady Chapel's east facade displays arcaded lancet windows with a small rose window above and a gable. The nave's east facade has 3 large lancets with 5 smaller lancets above, and is flanked by octagonal corner turrets with gabled niches and spires with gablets. The south facade shows paired lancets to the Lady Chapel separated by gabled buttresses, with a parapet, 2 roof dormers, and a lantern. The aisles feature 2-light plate tracery windows with quatrefoils. Clerestory windows are paired and pointed, with single windows in the sanctuary. The transepts are gabled with octagonal turrets at their angles, terminating in gablets and spires, and have tripartite lancets at ground and first storey level with a rose window above. The tower base has mostly blind arcading. The unfinished west end is largely brick with a stone entrance featuring 3 lancets.

The interior is notable for its timber hammer beam roof in the nave, decorated with angels and central bosses of snowflake design. The nave also features a double-arcaded triforium and roll-moulded crossing arches on clustered columns. A 19th-century south transept rose window by Archibald Nicholson depicts a dove at its centre surrounded by musician angels, cherubim and seraphim, with the lancets below showing Christ in Majesty accompanied by ranks of saints, apostles, angels and earth. The sanctuary has a rib-vaulted stone roof with foliated bosses and a brass sanctuary lamp designed by Pugin. Behind the high altar is a screen with an open traceried window giving onto the Lady Chapel. The Lady Chapel, formerly called the English Chapel, features a richly painted timber roof supported on stone angel corbels and has deeply cut stone sedilia around it. The chapel contains 20th-century glass.

Attached cast-iron railings with foliated finials and brick and stone walls surround areas of the building.

The church ceased to function as a Catholic Apostolic place of worship when the last priest of that denomination died in 1963. It became part of the Anglican University Chaplaincy and its sole place of worship in 1968.