291 Gallery (Former St Augustine'S Church)

This is a mid-Victorian Gothic Revival church, built in 1866-7 by the architect Henry Woodyer. It stands on Yorkton Street in the East End of London and has been converted into an arts centre.

Background

St Augustine's was one of six churches built under the Haggerston Church Scheme to serve a poor and densely populated area. The site was purchased for £2,000 and conveyed to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The foundation stone was laid at the end of 1865, and the building was consecrated on 12 April 1867. The builder was Futcher of Salisbury, and the final cost exceeded £9,000, funded in part by the Bishop of London's Fund (£750) and the Incorporated Church Building Society (£150, reduced from £200 because the church was only partially furnished with benches, with chairs providing the remaining seating).

Henry Woodyer (1815-96) was a gentleman-architect of considerable private means, based at Grafham, Surrey. This was his only London church. He was a pupil of the great church architect William Butterfield and established a strong reputation for his church work, with his masterpiece widely considered to be Dorking parish church. The greatest concentration of his work lies in Surrey and the adjacent counties.

St Augustine's became an important centre of advanced, ritualist churchmanship in the mid-Victorian period. In 1889 there was daily celebration of communion, with altar lights, vestments and the use of incense. An illustration in The Graphic from 5 March 1881 shows full ritualist ceremonial taking place in the chancel.

Architecture

The church is constructed of stock brick with limestone dressings and slate roofs. It comprises a nave, chancel, and north and south aisles. The architectural composition is striking: the nave and chancel are under a continuous roof with lean-to aisles running the full length of the building, creating an impressive, severe effect. The main body is very tall and features clerestory windows grouped in pairs.

The east window sits high up in the chancel wall, originally to accommodate a tall reredos designed for the church by Woodyer. It has five lights with tracery made up of three circles containing multiple trefoils. At the west end, a large circular window is filled with complex tracery based on cinquefoils, with three pairs of two-light windows below it featuring cusping trefoils and cinquefoils in the heads.

Inside, the nave arcades have double-chamfered arches with octagonal piers and moulded capitals. The clerestory windows feature rere-arches with shafts. Shafts rise from corbels in the valleys of the arcades to the arch-braced roof. The chancel arch, high and wide, is supported on semi-circular responds and leads to a two-bay chancel. The chancel is covered by a timber panelled vault.

The chancel aisles originally contained seating, with a vestry at the east end on the north side and an organ at the east end on the south side. The organ was later moved and a chapel created at the east end of the south aisle. Fittings and furnishings have since been removed.

Later History and Conversion

The church suffered bomb and fire damage during the Second World War, which was repaired in the 1950s. However, its future became uncertain, and no services were held after the 1960s. A long period of decline and decay followed, with redundancy finally declared in 1983. Over the next decade the building became derelict and was added to the English Heritage Buildings at Risk Register. It was sold in 1993.

Very extensive restoration and conversion work took place between 1994 and 1998 to transform the derelict building into the 291 Gallery, an arts centre, which opened in 1998. This work included renewal of internal plaster, new leaded windows, new copings, new flooring, new roofs on the north and south aisles, repairs to window surrounds using real and reconstituted stone, and extensive reslating of the nave roof. An entrance was cut through the east end of the north aisle. The work was undertaken to a high standard and matched to the original as far as possible. Internally, the original character has inevitably been radically changed by the conversion, with aisles, nave and chancel partitioned off from one another. However, this adaptation has enabled the building to remain in beneficial use.