Qualla: St James's Church, Piccadilly

St James's Church, Piccadilly: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Txllxt TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0. Christopher Wren built more than fifty churches in London after the Great Fire, but almost all of them were squeezed onto medieval foundations, their footprints inherited from buildings that had stood there for centuries. St James's Piccadilly was different. Here Wren got to start with an empty lot. In 1662 the Earl of St Albans had been granted what was then open ground on the western edge of London for a new residential development, and he set aside land for a parish church. Wren took the commission in 1672 and produced something he considered a model of his own ideas about how an English Protestant church should work - a single broad space where every member of the congregation could see the preacher and hear the words, a light-filled box of red brick and Portland stone topped with galleries and a barrel vault. He later wrote that he thought it the most successful of all his designs.

Image: Txllxt TxllxT | CC BY-SA 4.0

St James's Church, Piccadilly: Gibbons in Limewood and Marble

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JoThePotter, CC BY-SA 4.0. What makes St James's astonishing inside is what Wren entrusted to a young Dutch-born carver named Grinling Gibbons. Gibbons had been discovered by John Evelyn working in a Deptford cottage and brought to royal attention; he became the greatest decorative woodcarver in English hi...

Image: JoThePotter | CC BY-SA 4.0

St James's Church, Piccadilly: The Bomb, the Rebuilding, the Garden

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. On the night of 14 October 1940 a German bomb tore through St James's. The rectory and vestry were destroyed; the church was gutted; the original spire collapsed. For years afterwards the building stood as a roofless shell while London tried to imagine its future. Restoration fin...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

St James's Church, Piccadilly: Keep It Open

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Burials in the parish of St. James's, Westminster, in the County of Middlesex, in the Year 1819., Public domain. By the late 1970s, like many central London churches surrounded by commercial buildings and bereft of permanent residents, St James's was fading. When Donald Reeves was offered the rectorship in 1980, the bishop's brief was said to be simply: I don't mind what you do, just keep i...

Image: Burials in the parish of St. James's, Westminster, in the County of Middlesex, in the Year 1819. | Public domain

St James's Church, Piccadilly: A Choirmaster Bound for Carnegie Hall

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a small detail in the church's records that hints at how many remarkable lives have passed through this building. From 1902 to 1905 the choirmaster at St James's Piccadilly was a young man named Leopold Stokowski. He was twenty when he took the job. He would leave London...

Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

St James's Church, Piccadilly: What Concerts and Markets Bring

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Wander past St James's on a weekday and you might find an antiques market in the forecourt; on Friday and Saturday it becomes an arts and crafts market. Step inside on any given evening and there might be a concert under way - the acoustics are warm and intimate, and the church r...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0