Walking through The Gate of Heaven and octagonal vestibule, we would enter the main church building and encounter the substantial concrete font.  Its massively heavy slate lid would be raised every Sunday by the industrial chain and pulley system - made at the docks when they still existed - suspended from the concrete roof.  We would then take our hymn books and service sheet from the bookshelf and assume our usual places.  As we looked up, we would see the black steel girders of the large, four-sided corona which hangs from the roof in the central space and onto which is mounted a number of candles.  Black steel also supports the altar canopy (ciborium) and makes up the frames for the suspended electric lights.

 

Gresham (known only to me then as ‘Father Kirkby’), would lead the singing enthusiastically while playing the organ, built by NP Mander - its console to the side of, but facing, the congregation and its stainless steel pipes high up on the west wall - while John Rowe, a worker priest who was an electrician’s mate at Truman’s Brewery, officiated from the centrally-placed altar, singing Gregorian chant in mellifluous tones.  The modest congregation – usually no more than ten souls with a few accompanying children – did their best to meet the vocal challenges of the various chants and often obscure hymn tunes with limited success, saved only by one or two more confident participants.  Mum, along with one or two of her friends, would sometimes take Gresham to task afterwards about his choice of hymn tunes.  On the rare occasions when John was away, Gresham would officiate, having pre-recorded all the music on his reel-to-reel tape recorder which was operated during the service by his dedicated housekeeper, Winnie Wyatt.  Each musical extract would be preceeded by a ‘clunk’ of the machine’s mechanical switch, which echoed around the brick, concrete and glass building, followed by another, and equally reverberant, ‘clunk’ from the recording itself.  Then we would hear Gresham’s singing voice and organ accompaniment, slightly distorted as the small loudspeaker struggled to fill the church with sound.

There seemed nothing unusual about accompanying my mother to church on Sunday mornings; a routine which continued, uninterrupted, for eighteen years.  As a child, my hair would be especially Brylcreemed and parted with a brisk military flourish by my father, and I would don a short-trousered suit and elasticated tie (sometimes even a bow-tie) as ‘Sunday Best’.  In later years, I would have a little more freedom to choose my apparel – and my hair, in keeping with the early 1970s, had grown to shoulder length - although a minimum Sunday standard was still required.  Mum and I would then leave the house in Dagenham at 9am, walk along Hedgemans Road to the Heathway, catch the District Line to Mile End (ten stops along the line) and walk the final ten minutes along the deserted Burdett Road to St Paul’s, Bow Common for the service at 10am.  It never occurred to me that this might be an unusually long and complicated journey to attend church every Sunday, although occasionally a friend would express a certain amount of surprise about it.

 

The original church building had been destroyed by bombing in the second world war, and the nearby church of St Luke’s - which was the one Mum attended from childhood - had also become unusable, so they were combined and the new church built on the site of the old St Paul’s.  There had been strong recommendations from some parishioners over the years that the church should be known as St Paul with St Luke (my mother was one of the protagonists) but this was never fully adopted, although the church’s primary school, at which Mum served on the governing body, now has that name.  The parish priest (and my godfather), Fr. Gresham Kirkby, had enlisted two young architects, Robert Maguire and Keith Murray - neither of whom had designed a church before – who were in sympathy with his vision of a revolutionary building in which everyone could fully be a part of the act of worship.  The result, at the time of its consecration in 1960, was described in the Architectural Review as ‘the most important church built in the 20th century’, and it remains striking, even today.  Maguire and Murray went on to design many more churches, informed by the concepts embodied in St Paul’s, Bow Common, as well as the primary school of St Paul with St Luke; another building which took radical new approaches to meet its brief.

 

 

St Paul’s, Bow Common – A Unique Anglican Church in East London

I stopped going to church at the age of eighteen when I was about to leave school to go to music college, later moving to the midlands.  However, over the years I maintained contact with St Paul’s and Gresham through Mum and the Rowe family.  It was when I returned to live in the south east, some twenty years later in 1995, that I started to visit Gresham socially; he was now retired and living in a small house within the grounds of St James, Islington.  It was then that I began to appreciate him as a godfather, socialist, expert in liturgical music, independent thinker and the inspiration behind the radical design of St Paul’s, Bow Common, by now listed as Grade 2* by English Heritage.  And I also began to understand that there was, indeed, something unusual about accompanying my mother to that particular church, and why, for so many years, she chose to travel so far to go there.  (Julia Speare died 8th July 2006).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The location of the angel on the east wall

St Paul’s, Bow Common continues its mission in the East End of London under the ministry of Fr. Duncan Ross and I am indebted to him for his help in filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge, providing me with some useful photographs, and his very genuine appreciation of the history of the church and its people.  Thanks, also, to John Rowe and his family for their considerable help and continuing friendship.

 

Paul Speare

2006

 

Acknowledgements:      The Estate of Fr. Gresham Kirkby              John Rowe              Fr. Duncan Ross                  

 

Links:

 

                          St Paul's, Bow Common                                                              Obituary to Fr. Gresham Kirkby — The Guardian

 

                                                           Kingdom Come – an essay by Gresham Kirkby

 

Obituary to Keith Murray, Architect — The Guardian                 ‘Church Design Since 1950’ (Robert Maguire) - Ecclesiology Today, January 2002

 

                                                                       Charles Lutyens: Sculptor Painter Artist

For two years there was an additional feature in the church; a large scaffolding structure which, every few weeks, would have been moved along slightly.  This was to facilitate the installation, by Charles Lutyens (great nephew of the architect, Edwin Lutyens), of the mosaic angels which grace the four walls above the white pillars and between the triangular arches.  Additionally, in each corner is represented one of the four ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water.  During this painstaking process, Winnie Wyatt would often sit and talk to the artist while he worked, once commenting that the angel he was creating at the time, on the east wall, seemed to have what looked like a baby on its left shoulder.  As a consequence of Winnie’s observation, he incorporated this feature; a permanent reminder of a dearly-loved member of the church.

 

 

Fr. Gresham Kirkby :  1916 — 2006

A proud day for Mum, c.1970

left: Bishop Trevor Huddleston, centre: Julia Speare, right : Fr. Gresham Kirkby

It was very rare for Gresham to be away, although there was one particular Sunday in 1961 when, having taken our seats, I asked Mum where Father Kirkby was that day.  She calmly replied, “He’s in prison this week.” (he’d been arrested at an anti-nuclear protest), and I recall that I accepted this, as with so many aspects of attending St Paul’s, as nothing unusual.

 

The Gospel was delivered from a slender wooden lectern, across which was a simple textile support for the Bible.  The sermon – sometimes political, often challenging - was also delivered from the floor; there was no lofty, ornate pulpit here.  Everything took place on the same level as the congregation and, therefore, everyone present was equally engaged.

 

The scent of incense would gradually increase in intensity throughout the service, the resulting haze illuminated by daylight from the rooftop glass ‘lantern’ and shot through with beams of sunlight projected from the triangular windows to the sides.  This ethereal effect provided a backdrop to the austerity of the proceedings, emphasised by the ringing of a small set of ceremonial bells which punctuated the heavy pauses during the Eucharist, and the often cold temperature of the church (the large electric fan heaters, recessed in ducts in the floor, were too expensive to run for very long).

 

On reaching the age of seven, I was considered ready to be a server (altar-boy), along with my two contemporaries.  For a few weeks, after the church service, “servers’ training” took place under the experienced guidance of regulars, Terry and Bill.  A rota was then drawn up so that each novice was on duty for two weeks in every three.  I continued in this role for a further eleven years.  There were slightly different aspects to it, according to whether I was an acolyte (carrier of a candle or the cross) or thurifer (incense carrier), but the rituals became largely automatic after a while.  However, there remained some occasions which I would look forward to with apprehension.  The first of these was the annual Palm Sunday procession.  Gresham, a committed Anglo-Catholic, would hold a procession – for which there was a dedicated path (ambulatory) around the colonnade of the church – on Holy Days, but on Palm Sunday this would take a route around the exterior.  St Paul’s is situated on a busy junction between Burdett Road and St Paul’s Way, and parading around the corner in an alb (white robe) whilst singing a hymn, watched by a considerable audience of bemused passers-by, was something of an ordeal for a young, self-conscious server such as I.  Also, I used to worry, irrationally, about my candle being extinguished, inevitably, by the wind and would be willing it to stay alight.  Another, quite different, challenge was presented on Maundy Thursday (Thursday before Easter).  To commemorate the occasion when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, Gresham would symbolically wash the servers’ feet using a ceramic bowl of luke warm water.  Of course, particular attention had been paid to my feet before leaving home to ensure that they were already clean, but I think it was the act of removing my shoes and socks and putting them back on again during the service which seemed the most incongruous.

As Mum and I emerged from the Burdett Road railway bridge, the church’s landmark glass ‘lantern’ would appear, sitting high upon the massive, cuboid upper structure of flint brick.  Like many significant buildings of post-war design, St Paul’s seemed to exude an air of confidence and optimism for a new and better world.  On approaching the entrance and walking around to the doors, we would see the inscriptions above (carved by Ralph Beyer, who also created the inscriptions for the Tablets of the Word at Coventry Cathedral): TRULY THIS IS NONE OTHER – BUT THE HOUSE OF GOD – THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN.  (This has long-since been incorporated into local terminology, the bus stop outside being commonly known as “The Gate of Heaven”).