Chapel, St Mary'S University College

Chapel, St Mary's University College

This college chapel, built between 1962 and 1963, was designed by Sir Albert Richardson of Houfe and Partners, with S P A Holland as job architect and Travers Morgan and Partners as structural engineers. The building sits above a small chapel and crypt that originally housed the library, with a former covered way and steps forming part of the composition. An initial design was prepared in 1960, but the building was constructed to a revised design.

The chapel is a reinforced concrete structure clad in Staffordshire brown-grey brick with stone dressings. Windows and copings are of Box stone and matching reconstructed stone. The roof is covered in Stonewold interlocking tiles laid on timber and steel trusses, concealed behind parapets.

The first-floor chapel is reached by external stairs and features a projecting ancillary staircase to the north. The main chapel contains a five-bay nave with a two-bay chancel and a single-bay entrance housing a pair of staircases leading to a west-end balcony and ambulatory. A sacristy occupies the east end. The ground floor contains a small chapel flanked by vestries, with a former library to the west and a former covered cloister way set behind the external stairs. A new library was added to the south in 1996.

The building's exterior is distinguished by deep buttresses positioned within the church and cut by passage aisles, leaving the outside elevations sheer and simple with only slightly projecting brick piers articulating the composition. The west end is raised higher, featuring a tall west window set between angled staircase turrets above double entrance doors with a segmental head and brick ribs in the tympanum. The windows are trefoil-headed lancets in concrete. The blind east end incorporates a foundation stone laid in 1962.

Internal finishes include Agba joinery, screens, balustrades and furniture designed by the architects. Stairs are of reconstituted stone with lino tile flooring. The windows were originally fitted with leaded lights and were subsequently filled with stained glass by the studios of M. Gabriel Loire, master glazier of Chartres Cathedral. The programme was not completed at the chapel's opening in 1963 but now forms a complete abstract ensemble strong in blues and reds, with a contrasting west window of blue and yellow. The underlying concept reflects the mysteries of the Rosary. A high painted reredos stands behind a marble altar and steps representing a post-Vatican II reworking of Richardson's original simpler raised forward altar. The lower chapel retains a nineteenth-century altar. The timber ceiling features timber trusses with ashlar sides. A reredos by Peter Gallichen and Albert Rose, both teachers at the college, depicts the commissioning of the project from Richardson in the lower right-hand corner. A linking projecting spiral staircase is glazed with stained glass by Lavers and Westlake, signed and dated 1901, of unknown original location.

Projecting steps enforce the overall symmetry of the composition. Six buttresses set between them add to the verticality and power of the design. A four-bay cloister with segmental arched openings flanks the chapel on the line of its entrance behind the projecting steps. The 1996 library addition minimally compromises the composition.

The chapel's design was influenced by the medieval brick cathedral at Albi, a popular model in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for brick churches. The building marks the end of a long and distinguished tradition appropriate to High Anglican and Roman Catholic worship, with a total cost of £104,000 reflecting its lavish scale and superior finishes. It is rare to find a church of the 1960s so massive and traditional, and which stands as such a distinguished successor to college chapels of previous centuries.

Sir Albert Richardson (1880-1964) was one of the last and most renowned architects to work in a traditional style, notable for his love of late Georgian architecture and outspoken detestation of modernism in his later years. His range of architectural styles was far greater than commonly imagined. He combined architectural practice with a teaching career as Professor of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London from 1919 to 1947. His pre-1939 work was predominantly commercial, though it included two listed churches in Luton and Greenford, Ealing, based on timber-framed barn construction. His post-war work was more wide-ranging, encompassing college and public housing commissions alongside offices and public buildings, the most important of which are listed. This chapel is his only complete post-war church and one of his most significant late works.