Overlooked Britain
Sir John Betjeman is the patron saint of Victorian churches. But St Betj didn’t actually design many of them – except for St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, tucked away behind Harrods.
In 1958, the wise vicar consulted Betjeman on the church’s redecoration. Betjeman was an expert on architect G F Bodley, who decorated the interior in the 1890s.
‘As to the roof, I would not be at all surprised if the spaces between the ribs were not once coloured,’ said Betjeman, ‘Probably a reddish brown with gold stars on it.’ The chancel roof (pictured) was duly painted red with gold stars.
The Betjeman roof is only one of the highlights in the glimmering treasure trove of St Paul’s. When it was built in 1843 by Thomas Cundy II, the church, on the Grosvenor Estate, was rather a bare box. But then, as a hotbed of the Oxford Movement, the church grew rich in ritual and ornament over the next eighty years – you could be forgiven for thinking it was Catholic.
The first layer of decoration came in the 1870s with Daniel Bell’s 24 sepia tile pictures in the nave. The Pre-raphaelite scenes – from Jesus’s life – look like they’re set in a medieval English church. A gloomy cow at Christ’s nativity pokes her head through a Gothic ogee arch; not many of those in Bethlehem.
Then, in 1892, along came George Frederick Bodley, master of the Gothic Revival and architect of Holy Trinity, South Kensington.
Bodley turned the clock back 400 years, to the pre-reformation look. His timber rood screen could have stepped straight out of a 14th-century parish church, with ogee arches topped by the rood cross. He designed the statues of St Paul and the Virgin and Child next to the rood screen. He even did the stained glass in the Tree of Jesse in the east window.
The final layer of decoration came with the delicately realist Stations of the Cross, painted in the 1920s by Gerald Moira, who decorated the Trocadero, the Lloyd’s Shipping boardroom and the Old Bailey – quite a range.
When I visited, restorer Hamish Dewar was cleaning a century of dirt from the Stations of the Cross, letting fresh sunlight in on Jesus’s last hours.
Around the corner is the sort of pub Betjeman would have loved: the Grenadier, formerly the Duke of Wellington’s officers’ mess, built in 1720 and decorated with the Grenadiers’ battle honours from Waterloo to the Somme.
Lucinda Lambton is away