Church of St Mary

The Church of St Mary, Bourne Street, is a church built in 1873-4 and extended in 1924, with fittings ranging from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. The original church was designed by Robert Jewell Withers, with the extension by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel. The interior contains paintings by Nathaniel Westlake and fittings by Sidney Gambier Parry, Martin Travers, Goodhart-Rendel and others.

The original church is constructed of machine-made red brick with limestone dressings, featuring a timber roof structure covered in Welsh slate. The 1924 extension uses softer red brick with granite dressings and concrete vaulting. The plan consists of a five-bay aisled nave with a semicircular apse. To the north is a polygonal entrance porch (with a choir room above reached by a stair turret) leading to a large side chapel that opens onto the north aisle.

The main church, visible only on its south elevation to Graham Street, is designed in the stripped-down early Gothic style associated with James Brooks. It has low windowless aisles, a very tall clerestorey with elongated lancet windows, and a steeply-pitched roof topped by a pyramidal timber and lead fleche with pierced quatrefoils. The 1924 entrance porch is an irregular seven-sided polygon at ground level and a regular nine-sided polygon above, with the transition achieved through a complex arrangement of stepped buttresses, corbels and offsets. The windows are paired lancets with moulded brick mullions and stone transoms. The remainder of the 1924 extension is largely hidden from public view, its principal external features being the octagonal stair turret to the upper choir room and the west window of the Seven Sorrows Chapel, composed of five stepped lancets under a retaining arch.

Withers' church comprises a high, broad nave separated from the narrow aisles by five-bay arcades of shaped brick set on cylindrical stone piers with carved capitals. These continue around the semicircular apse as blind arches on brick piers. The clerestorey windows are tall single lancets containing plain leaded glass, with stone heads connected by a continuous stencilled band and projecting moulding, above which are two broad bands of decorative brickwork with small open roundels. The nave roof is a boarded timber keel-vault with slender ribs and iron tie-rods. The aisles have lean-to roofs resting on brick half-arches; those to the north are now carried on the chamfered granite piers of Goodhart-Rendel's outer arcade.

Beyond this lies the Seven Sorrows Chapel, whose north wall has blind arches matching the arcade to the south, and whose roof is a concrete keel-vault reflecting that in the nave. The west window consists of five stepped lancets, and the east window is a simple circular opening. West of the chapel is a vestibule, its north wall treated as a low segmental arcade on heavy granite corbels, with a tiny passage-aisle behind and a miniature clerestorey above. This connects to the porch, an irregular seven-sided space with a brick rib-vault carried on granite corbels and relieving arches.

The church contains a distinguished set of fittings reflecting the classicising Anglo-Catholic tastes of the late 19th and 20th centuries. These include paintings in the arcade spandrels from 1895-6 by Nathaniel Westlake depicting angels and Old Testament figures in an Italian High Renaissance style. The organ case and gallery from 1908 by Sidney Gambier Parry are in an English Baroque style with segmental and broken pediments, scrollwork carving and urn and angel finials.

The reredos and high altar were originally designed in 1908 by Gambier Parry, altered in 1919 by Travers, and again in 1934 by Goodhart-Rendel. It features a crucifixion sculpture under a gilded canopy with fluted pilasters and scrolled volutes, the entablature above surmounted by tall finials and a cartouche of the Coronation of the Virgin. The high altar itself, from 1919 by Martin Travers, is a gilded sarcophagus bearing the paschal lamb amid a sunburst, with curved gradines enclosing a tabernacle in the form of a miniature domed temple. A number of elaborate candlesticks, also designed by Travers, stand on or about the altar, which is normally adorned with a Travers-designed silk frontal.

The statue of Our Lady Queen of Peace, now in the Seven Sorrows Chapel, dates from 1920 by Travers and depicts the Virgin and Child based on a medieval statue at Amiens, set in front of a gilded sunburst. The altar and reredos in the Seven Sorrows Chapel from 1929 by Goodhart-Rendel feature paintings by Colin Gill. The frame has twisted colonettes, cusped canopies and an embattled top rail, while the altar slab beneath rests on square piers with quasi-Byzantine decoration. The altar-rails have a honeycomb pattern of hexagons in roundels.

The altar and tabernacle in the south aisle, also from 1929 by Goodhart-Rendel, feature a Gothic/Byzantine style tabernacle, its canopy taking the form of a saucer dome with tiers of miniature windows and much polychromatic decoration. The angular stone altar beneath is severely Modernist. The confessional in the Seven Sorrows Chapel from 1936 by Goodhart-Rendel is a timber structure with zigzag-patterned colonettes rising to corner tourelles under tiny conical roofs.

The font beneath the organ gallery is of uncertain date by J Harold Gibbons and consists of a square stone bowl with scrolled carving and a gilded timber canopy with Gothic-Rococo ornament and pelican finial. The pulpit in the nave from 1972 by Laurence King is in 18th-century style, octagonal, with side panels featuring gilded armorial cartouches and turned balusters, and a large tester above.

The columbarium in the vestibule from 1999 by Roderick Gradidge features paintings by Anthony Ballantyne and Christopher Boulter. It is a small domed chamber framed by gilded timber columns and lined with 'rusticated' hardwood panelling, containing a glazed recess with a reliquary and tympana painted with stylised scenes of the resurrection.

The glass is mostly plain, with post-war coloured glass in the apse. The two stained-glass windows are in the central lancet at the west end (Saints George and Edward, 1897, by Mary Lowndes) and the oculus in the Seven Sorrows Chapel (emblems of the Virgin, 1955, by Margaret Edith Rope).

Behind the Seven Sorrows Chapel is a vestry of uncertain (probably late 19th century) date, with curious applied wall decoration in an 'artisan mannerist' style, a very large wooden altarpiece with overhanging canopy, and three small stained glass windows with emblems relating to the Eucharist, the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary.

The church was founded in 1874 as a chapel of ease to St Paul's, Knightsbridge, intended for use by the large servant population of Pimlico and Belgravia. It became equally fashionable with the wealthier residents of the district, allowing for the gradual enlargement and embellishment of the building through the late 19th and 20th centuries. A noted centre of Anglo-Catholic worship associated with the Society of St Peter and St Paul and the Anglo-Catholic Congress movement, the parish was a key sponsor of the 1921-7 'Malines Conversations', a series of talks between senior Anglicans and Roman Catholics aiming at the reunion of the two churches.

Robert Jewell Withers (1823-94) worked at Sherborne in Dorset and from 1851 in London, where he developed a sizeable practice based mainly on church work. He built or restored a number of churches in England including Gibbs' St Mary le Strand in 1870, but his most noted works are in south Wales, including St Peter's Church at Lampeter and the Cardigan Guildhall.

Martin Travers (1886-1948) was one of the 20th century's leading designers of church furnishings. Although he collaborated on the design of a number of buildings, he never formally qualified as an architect; instead he devoted his career to the design of ecclesiastical furnishings and stained glass, becoming the acknowledged master of the 'Back to Baroque' style associated with the inter-war Anglo-Catholic Congress movement. Apart from St Mary's, his principal works include the reordering of Wren's St Magnus Martyr in the City of London (1921-4), and the immense reredos at Butterfield's St Augustine, Queen's Gate in Kensington (1928).

Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959) was a key figure in both the 'traditionalist' school of 20th-century British architecture and the post-war revival of interest in Victorian design. An Anglican by upbringing and a Roman Catholic by conversion, he did much work for both churches, whether in the Arts and Crafts Gothic manner of Holy Trinity, St Leonards-on-Sea (1945-54) or the Byzantine-Romanesque style of Holy Trinity, Bermondsey (1951-60). He was president of the Architectural Association in 1924-5, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1933-6, and president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1937-9. In 1958 he became a founder member of the Victorian Society, reflecting a lifetime's study and admiration of the architecture of the 19th century.

The church has group value with the adjoining Presbytery, also designed by Goodhart-Rendel.