Church Of St Anselm

TQ 19 SE UPPINGHAM AVENUE (West side), Belmont 1157/2/10030 CHURCH OF ST ANSELM

II

Church. 1939-41 by N F Cachemaille-Day, incorporating elements from the former St Ansehn, Davies Street, City of Westminster, of 1891 by Balfour and Thackeray Turner, demolished in 1938. Brown stock brick, tiled roofs. Rectangular basilica plan, with apsidal East end sanctuary , apsidal baptistry to north west, and western gallery .Six-bay nave and four-bay chancel with wider aisles. Flowing reticulated tracery stone windows brought from St Ansehn, Davies Street, with thick 'Prior' glass also brought from the old church; small round-headed clerestory windows over body of nave. Round-arched stone south doorway with double doors. Single-storey vestries at East end. The interior is particularly impressive. Fine stone columns with cushion capitals brought from Davies Street where they were set in pairs), with smaller columns between the aisle windows. Flat ceiling. In the gold coloured apse a baldacchino to Cachemaille-Day's design, incorporating a painting of saints around the cross attributed to Giovanni Caroto, and surrounded by handsome marble paving; the Lady Chapel has a tester from Davies Street, formerly attributed to John Ninian Comper and certainly in his s~r1e, with a Virgin and Child attributed to the studio of Luca Giordano. Both paintings originally from the Hanover Chapel, Regent Street, via St Ansehn, Davies Street. The organ and choir stalls are also from Davies Street. The font is placed in a separate apse to the side of the western gallery , and the combination of shapes and levels here is particularly felicitous. While a number of inner London churches were demolished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to fund the building of new churches in the suburbs, the incorporation of so much old fabric within a homogenous 1930s' design makes St Ansehn, Behnont, remarkable. In part this was because the Davies Street church was recognised as an exceptional example of arts and crafts architecture -a rare design and normally attributed to Thackeray Turner in large measure; in part because Cachemaille-Day himself worshipped there; in part, too, it was occasioned by wartime shortages -indeed it was only because so many materials were salvaged that work on the church wa$ permitted to continue through the early years of the war. The result is a synthesis of Cachemaille-Day's own eclectic style, with a higher attention to detail than is often found in his work, enriched by older elements of remarkable quality.

Sources The Builder, 9 July 1943, Anthony Hill, 'N F Cachemaille-Day, A Search for Something More', in Thirties Society Journal no.7, 1991, pp.20-7 Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 3: North West, Harmondsworth, 1992, p.299 Informatiori from the church

Listing NGR: TQ1698490416